Bright Young Things discussion

Welcome to February's Group Read:



We're reading The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing, which was the winner of our recent poll.

Enjoy the book and when you're ready pop back here and let us know what you think!

Happy reading!

Ally

I'm roughly 180 pages into this book at the moment.

Weariness and contempt was my initial reaction to this book. I guess it was due to underlying topics/themes such as:
-white colonialism
-master and slave relations/taboos/racism
-superficial relations
-disintegration of a relation (that was superficial in the first place)
-characters that you can't completely dislike nor can you completely like
-etc.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Or in the case of this book, a bunch of bad themes don't particularly make a particularly good book, in a bad way (does that even make sense?).

Anyways, if I vehemently disliked the book so much why am I 180pgs in on the third day of the month? I do not particularly know why, but after beginning the book I have put my other readings on hold (including mandatory readings required by my classes) and have read this book non-stop. *Gobble Gobble* (the sound of me eating it up)

This behavior could be attributed to the traffic accident phenomenon or a bad reality show phenomenon where the urge to see how bad it is/can be forces you not to avert your eyes regardless of your values and opinions.OR Doris Lessing's composition is just so gripping and effective that it compels me to continue reading.OR BOTH.

Regardless of the reasons, I have to say due to the fact that I am still reading the book and at the pace I am reading, it must mean that I like the book in a backwards sort of way. Or I am a masochist. Most likely the former.

Steel-is-Real wrote: "I'm roughly 180 pages into this book at the moment.

Weariness and contempt was my initial reaction to this book. I guess it was due to underlying topics/themes such as:
-white colonialism
-master ..."

I think that The Grass is Singing is quite far from the cliche African/colonialism book because it centers on the idea of home/exile rather than on the mere socio-political problems of the African continent. One of quotes that I found most enlightening is to be found somewhere at the beginning of the second chapter:

For Mary, the word 'Home' spoken nostalgically, meant England, although both her parents were South Africans and had never been to England. It mean 'England' because of those mail-days, when she slipped up to the store to watch the cars come in, and drive away again laden with stores and letters and magazines from overseas. etc.

I think the main motivation behind Mary's actions is this feeling of isolation that (according to Doris Lessing) Europeans experience when they move to Africa.

I am almost finished. I like it very much, and very glad I picked it. I work with Indigenous Australians in remote rural areas, often going in to stay on the pastoral stations (huge cattle and sheep ranches / farms). The attitudes of various people in the book resonate very powerfully for me. I like the complexity to the relationships, and the contradictions that arise as a result of prolonged interaction - and away from a spying world of the city.
Will write more when I finish - likely tonight.

Isolation is definitely a huge theme with Grass, but I also think that it doesn't escape the cliche white colonial novel completely. The master/slave relation, the stereotypes, racism and white colonial pretension.

I just can't sympathize with Mary at all.

Dick, on the other hand, as ineffective at farming, scattered brained, and weak when it comes to Mary, I can totally sympathize with.

What won me over was his reason for farming. He farms to farm while others farm to make a profit.

Steel-is-Real wrote: "Isolation is definitely a huge theme with Grass, but I also think that it doesn't escape the cliche white colonial novel completely. The master/slave relation, the stereotypes, racism and white col..."

Yes Steel, I agree about Dick, a very interesting perspective, and something many farmers would find familiar. I am however partially sympathetic to Mary - she is really lost from beginning to end, conditioned by her awkward (outsider) up-bringing and prejudices. I don't agree with you, however, that it is a cliche colonial novel - quite the reverse. I think Lessing expresses very well the nature of the master servant relationship and the dehumanising process that it creates. It was also a critical novel at the time in alerting many outside Africa to the injustice of Apartheid. It's really from the point of view of Mary, and to a lesser degree other players, but not Moises or any of the black labourers, whose thoughts remain mostly closed to the reader. That would have been interesting, but I think it would then have been a quite different novel - it's Mary's internal (and muddled) thinking that the story is anchored in, that leads her to behave as she does and set up the conditions of her own demise.

I think that the novel deals with isolation - both in a physical sense and a psychological.

Mary is a victim because of her inability to cope with Moses as an equal human being, vascilating between loathing and wanting. I think I identify with it well partly because of my own experience of working in the Australian bush, and seeing the relationships between Aboriginal women and White men, that contain a level of dependence on each other, and a sea-saw of affection and loathing. I have sometimes had trouble grasping why both the male and female partner seem to spend a lot of time disliking each other, and yet are equally inseperable. I think it has something to do with the process of dehumanising other cultures, and in the process dehumanising one's self, creating (ironically) a situation in which both are victims and therefore drawn to each other. And, again, isolation has something to do with it - pushing people together who might otherwise never had looked upon each other. Something like that.

In any case I liked the story very much.

I have to agree with Steel in that I had no sympathy for Mary at all. She did not have one kind or virtuous thought. Instead, she was consumed with hate and contempt. At one point, when Mary was describing how badly the black people smelled and how hateful they were, I wasn’t sure if I could finish the book. I chose to speed through it, however, because I wanted to find out how she was murdered and also I enjoy Lessing’s descriptions of the land.

When I got to the end I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Moses seemed selfless, caring and gentle (as when he took care of Dick when he was ill) and he was educated, unlike most of the blacks who worked on the farm. Clearly a relationship of some sort had developed between him and Mary, but the end seemed to only prove true the ruling classes’ fear that if you educate a black and treat him as an equal, he will victimize you. Granted, Mary was inconsistent and that angered him, but I still felt that the outcome was a little stereotypical. I also felt like Lessing could have told us more about what happened between Moses and Mary, but that may have been too scandalous for the time.

I finished it a few days ago and have been mulling over my reactions to it....thankfully, you all have said it better than I could have! :} Lessing's blending of many relationships - personal, political, racial - kept me reading and thinking even when I loathed some of the emotions and reactions - especially Mary.

I'm glad I chose to read this one. I have had The Golden Notebook" for years and am looking forward to reading it this summer.

Well - I finished this book last night...and I don't know quite what to make of it!

I'm not sure I liked the flashback telling (I almost gave up only a few pages in but I decided to skip the first chapter and moved directly to chapter 2) - reading chapter 1 last was a must for me as it explained so much.

It was a pretty grim book but for all its soul-destroying intensity it was surprisingly gripping and - dare I say it - an easy read. That says a lot about Doris Lessing's abilities as a writer.

The ideas expressed within the story were extremely interesting - and I'm finding Robin's experiences illuminating here - the complexities of the relationships between races in South Africa at that time, together with the conspiratorial closed society of the white South African's was very well wrought. I particularly liked the way Lessing weaved this opression together with the opression of the intense heat of the African plains.

Moses was a puzzle - curiously I liked him as a character - but it is what Lessing does not say in these scenes that is most interesting - the novel is curiously devoid of sex and yet the novel oozes repressed sexuality - perhaps the natural consequence of the power-play within all relationships depicted here. - Did Moses act with dignity and kindness in his protection of Mary? or was it always a malicious and educated attempt to gain an upper hand? - a convincing argument could be made either way.

...and yet - a lot of what I was reading simply didn't ring true for me. Would a character like Mary marry for such paltry reasons? would she do so that quickly and without even visiting the farm that would become the depth and breadth of her life? Once there, would she really have left the running of the farm to Dick, when she was clearly the more business minded of the two - surely the self-contained Mary of the city could have engineered her life at the farm to both make money and satisfy Dick's love of farming for its own sake? and why would a socially active person like Mary suddenly refuse offers of friendship when she most needed them. Pride simply doesn't cut it for me as an answer - such pride is often broken down by prolonged years of poverty is it not?

Finally - there was a disconcerting genre change - it seemed to me to go from an instrumental political/social fiction into something akin to melodramatic horror (from the scene after Mary, with the support of Marston, told moses to go away) - I'm not sure this was necessary.

I need to ponder all of this a little further...

Ally

You said it so well, Ally...I find myself pondering it off and on even a week after I've read it. You've put into words what I couldn't...thanx! :}

I'm afraid I'm going to go all 'book club' on you! - but I'm dying to know what you think of the following question...

The Title of the book comes from one of the epigraph's at the front of the novel. Do you think that the title suits the book? and do the epigraph's illuminate anything for you?

Just in case you don't have the book to hand - here are the epigraphs again...

The Waste Land

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind=s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico, co co rico
In a flash of lightening. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder

T. S. Elliot


"It is by the failures and misfits of a civilisation that one can best judge its weaknesses" (Author unknown)

My view of the above is that the title is extremely poetic and yet also a little ominous. Poetry speaks to the very depths of our emotions and can express in words some very complex and intensely personal thoughts and emotions.

I think this extract from T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' is very poignant in terms of this novel. particularly the last line quoted "Then spoke the thunder" - its as if there is a powder keg of feeling and emotion set to break out. Knowing what we know now of South Africa's recent history this book is rather prophetic.

So, although the title is poetic, whereas the subject matter is decidedly less so, it is still a really fitting title for this book in terms of its wider context within Eliot's poem.

Ally