Which leads to another subject of white poverty, but I am ahead of myself already. The way that ‘natives’, as they were called, are treated is horrendous and we get to see this as we follow Mary once she marries Dick and joins him on his ramshackle farm. The big story at its core initially seems to be the one about race and the racist attitudes of society in what is now known as Zimbabwe. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.Īnd then they turned the page to something else.īut the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly.Ĭonsidering that The Grass is Singing is relatively slight at 206 pages, there is so much going on within it that I left the book feeling that Doris Lessing (who was only 25 when she wrote this) was an utter genius. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. Even if Moses, the houseboy, has admitted to the murder what led him to committing it, and what was the relationship between himself and Mrs Turner? What adds to the interest from the start is that it isn’t the police that have taken over the investigation but the neighbouring farmer Charlie Slatter and, as we learn in the first chapter, Tony Marston, the new English farm hand, thinks there may have been more to the incident than meets the eye. The mystery at the heart of the article, and indeed The Grass is Singing, is why this has happened. Mary Turner has been murdered by her and Richard Turner’s houseboy, one of the natives. The Grass is Singing starts with the announcement in a local paper of the shocking news that on one of the farms in Ngesi, Southern Rhodesia, there has been a murder. 4th Estate Books, 1950 (2013 edition), paperback, 206 pages, fiction, bought by my good self

The grass is singing characters