Return to the ice deserts
ROZ KAVENEY
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Doris Lessing writes about the point at which her characters ride out of history and into legend...
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The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, Doris Lessing, Fourth Estate, p.282, £15.99. 0 00 715280 9
MARA AND DANN (1999), Doris Lessing's story of an epic trek down the length of a future Africa destroyed by drought, famine and war, is perhaps the finest of her ventures into science fiction. The novel has a moving sense of frustrated aspiration: 20th-century civilisation was about as good as human existence ever got, and all that our descendants will remember are a few garbled tales. As she travels with her young brother, Mara acquires knowledge, but she also learns enough to know that what is done cannot be undone and that the sensible thing is to make what little happiness one can from cultivating a small farm, or indeed a garden.
Mara's naοve, lively intelligence and frequent emotional self-delusion were very appealing in that novel. Her almost offhand death in childbirth, offstage, is one of the breaks with the past that determine the strengths and limitations of the sequel, The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. Lessing has an important message here: that we should not take for granted an extension to the human lifespan and an immunity to biological consequences, for the future may not continue to hold. Sadly, however, the point is made at the expense of a narrative that holds the reader's attention.
Dann, Mara's disturbed younger brother, is simply not as interesting as his sister, either to us or, more importantly, to Lessing, who is keen to see him as a case study in male aggression and thus neglects to make him sympathetic. Wandering away from the farm to explore, he sees how the permafrost of an Ice Age Mediterranean is melting, gradually flooding the plain which is becoming navigable once more. From a distance the icy mountains — all that is left of Europe — can be glimpsed. Lessing does not seem very interested in describing the sublimity of these landscapes; she wrote very well about ice deserts before, in The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), and there is a limit to the ways in which the cold and the vast can be reprised. On his return to Africa, Dann builds a military empire in order to guard the Centre, a repository of leftover machinery and texts from our world, and when the rising marshes threaten it, he conquers a nearby country as a place for a new repository. From time to time, the dark side of Dann, the side that once gambled his sister into slavery, rises up and has to be controlled, and this future Alexander confesses his dependence on his sidekicks.
Griot, the young captain who keeps Dann away from opium and self-destruction, is a more interesting character, largely because he is involved with something outside himself. His devotion to Dann and Dann's causes, and to solving the problems that stand in their way, is at once ingenious and selfless. Lessing does not suggest that there is anything sexual in his devotion; she wants Griot to be more admirably enigmatic than that. He is the sort of follower who forces leaders to be their better selves, a conscience who never wants to be a rival. The girl Tamar and the dog Ruff are there to help Griot keep Dann on the straight and narrow. Tamar is not as charismatic as her dead mother, Mara, and we hardly get to see her inner life, while the dog is the animal companion that all legendary heroes have; he is part of what makes it clear to us that Dann's life will be a story for later generations.
The Story of General Dann is essentially an appendage to a tale Lessing has already written; it exemplifies further the earlier novel's ideas of the vanity of human wishes and the desolation that time makes of all endeavours. Like any sequel it gratifies the reader's idle curiosity about the later lives of its characters, but it feels less rich for doing so. The ageing General Shabis, who found happy retirement with Mara on her farm, was more complete than the widower who, in the later story, wanders off to rebuild his lost empire as Dann's ally.
At various points in both novels, we get extracts from works of world literature as they have evolved or been twisted by time. Later generations, for whom much of the story is meaningless, understand Noah and Anna Karenina and love the sense of danger or passion they still convey. In both of the Mara and Dann novels, Doris Lessing writes about the point at which her characters ride out of history and into legend: the pair will be remembered, she suggests, long after anything they succeeded in doing has crumbled. What lasts of us is the story, and it is the story that helps people endure.
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