Mara and Dann - Tapa dura

The new novel from one of the greatest twentieth-century writers.

Doris Lessing returns to the world of visionary fiction, last visited in her acclaimed ‘Canopus in Argos’ quintet of novels in the 1980s.

It is sooner than you might think. And the earth’s climate is much changed – it’s colder than ever before in the north, and unbearably dry and hot in the south. Mara, who is seven, and her four-year-old brother Dann find themselves somewhere very strange, not home, getting used to all these new names...

They are taken in by a kindly, grandmotherly woman, to make a new life in this unforgiving rocky terrain. Their new guardian seems to be of their kin, and the caution and curiosity of her neighbours confirms to the alert Mara that she and Dann are in some way marked as notable, so special that many will come to seek them, many to suspect them, and disguise will often seem the best option. This new life is hard: hunger, dirt, thirst and danger are the children’s constant companions as they grow into their selves. Drought and fire carry off their adoptive home and force them to set off northward into the unknown, to experience a series of adventures, cultures, trials, revelations and crises that bring them through to an altogether altered world, where they can start to learn and build anew, to achieve a new kind of notability.

Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we only dimly perceive and scarcely know how to value.

At the southern end of a large land mass called Ifrik, two children, Mara and Dann, are victims of a palace coup and forced to flee in the middle of the night. They are brought up in a poor rural village, surviving the hardships of a life threatened as much by drought and wild animals as by the hostile Rock People, who hate them. They join the great human migration northward, away from the southern lands that are turning to dust.

Mara and Dann encounter all kinds of people, survive many dangers. They are captured and enslaved, but escape, to be captured again in a country permanently at war. Dann becomes a general, while Mara finds herself a soldier in the opposing army. Again they escape, always travelling north – she finds herself in a brothel only to run away; he nurses her through the terrible water sickness. This brother and sister love each other, save each other’s lives a hundred times, travelling north – but what is North; what will they find there?

Mara hungers for answers to the questions, Who are our parents, and why do so many people risk their lives to save us, as if we were precious? Who lived long ago in the ruins we see everywhere? Why do cities and peoples disappear? Mara, who sustains a compassionate loving nature despite the cruelty all round her, is one of Doris Lessing’s most appealing heroines. And Dann is as brave a hero as you’ll find in any old tale.

Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we only dimly perceive and scarcely know how to value.