In offering us the truth rather than the facts of the case, Lessing leaves out the details of what might be considered the two essential events of the novel: she does not tell us the sexual details of Mary’s relationship with Moses, and she leaves out the details of Moses’ murder of Mary. Isolated and unhappy on his farm, Mary begins to break down mentally, to the point where she behaves in a way unthinkable to white Rhodesian society of the time and breaks the colour bar, forming a strange and dysfunctional relationship with Moses. Mary has married unhappily her husband Dick is a poor and incompetent farmer in the Rhodesian veldt.

Lessing gives us the ‘facts’ of the case as set out in the newspaper report of the incident, and then proceeds to examine what she sees as the ‘truth’ of the situation. The novel begins with the murdered body of Mary Turner, killed by her black house servant Moses. The surprise on rereading it is how much of the novel is taken up with the mental disintegration of the central character and the way in which Lessing shows that mental breakdown as being intertwined with the political situation of the white colonialist farmers. I haven’t read it in some years and remembered it as a fairly straightforward novel about the colour bar in colonial Rhodesia. The above passage, from Lessing’s The golden notebook, marks out what is really interesting about The grass is singing.

If Marxism means anything, it means that a little novel about the emotions should reflect “what’s real” since the emotions are a function and a product of a society …’. God knows what that remark means, I don’t. You write about what’s real.’Īnna almost laughed again, and then said soberly: ‘Do you realize how many of the things we say are just echoes? That remark you’ve just made is an echo from Communist Party criticism - at its worst moments, moreover. ‘ After all, you aren’t someone who writes little novels about the emotions.

The grass is singing characters