Thorns in Dreamland

THE GRASS Is SINGING (245 pp.)--Don's Lesslng--C rowel I ($3).

Many an English middle-class family, caught in the business end of the economic nutcracker, has been dreaming of a freer, easier life in South Africa. Novelist Lessing, who was reared there, has bad news about their dreamland. Her story describes the spiritual defeat of a misfit couple in their war with the harsh realities of the veld. Few writers have succeeded so well in getting its thorny unkindness and its head-splitting heat down on paper, and few have written more devastatingly about the dream of living an easy European life against the harsh African grain.

Novelist Lessing's Turners were not destined to be happy in the first place. Dick Turner had married Mary because he was lonely. She married him because she was desperate to be married. Dick was a weak, impractical character slowly being licked by his farm on the veld, Mary an ingrained spinster with no conception of the give & take that marriage demands. Everything they owned had gone into the farm, and the farm had become their prison.

When the Turners were near the breaking point, a new houseboy, Moses, came on the scene. He was a Zulu. Across the rigidly drawn race barrier, Mary Turner could see that he was everything her husband wasn't. Moses had integrity, stubborn endurance and physical magnificence. In self-defense, she took to nagging him for minor mistakes. Mary was trying to build up a sense of his inferiority in her own mind and his. It didn't work out that way. The story reaches its logical and violent conclusion with Dick Turner gone mad, Mary Turner lying murdered on the farmhouse porch, and Moses waiting for the police to come and get him.

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