The Grass is Singing

The Grass is Singing tells the unhappy story of Mary, whose marriage is a failure. Her story runs parallel to that of Rhodesia, where the understanding between white and black people was very difficult in the 1940s.

The books has a perfect structure. It begins with the news of Mary's murder and ends with the murder itself. The 267 pages needed by DL to tell her story are startling, because we can see how feelings and emotions are developed toward true tragedy as the protagonist is led to her own destruction as she neglects her responsibility towards herself to others: her husband, Tony Marston, the young British worker, or Moses, the back servant.

Both the characters and the events are true to life. The back servants are strong but lazy, the whites are organized in two groups: the successful Slatter and the losers: the Turner. On the other hand, Tony Marston represents the newly arrived intellectual, unable to apply his ideas to solve everyday problems.

The style is absorving, as the reader gets inside a tiresome atmosphere where the psychological landscape of the main character echoes in the veld. On the other hand the deafening cicadas with their cries seem to boost the neurastenic state in which all the action of the novel is held.

The Turners and specially Mary are affected by an illness which counfounds the soul. This sadness impregnates the events and lifes of the farmers and natives.

All the narrative is a fashback. The first page tells us the end. The rest of the book is about what happeded before and the way everything led to this unhappy and strage end.

Mary's story is a contemporary tragedy as it defines a woman's destiny. DL looks at married life face to face and says things for the first time that nobody wants to hear. The author shows how men and women's psychology differ up to a point in which communication between them is impossible. Mary becomes ill in her mind because she cannot adjust herself to the social preassures.

A compelling narrative which lets us uneasy about the roles of men and women in society. A landmark of twentieth-century narrative. A masterpiece of realism, full of Africa's mystery and beauty