Book Review: Doris Lessing's Dystopian Future novel Mara and Dann

I enjoyed Mara and Dann more than any book I've read. It took me a week to finish it because the beginning is a bit gloomy and disorienting. Nevertheless, the story of Mara and Dann is about an orphaned brother and sister who had all kinds of adventures, experienced a hundred vicissitudes and ended up living happily ever after. The story is set in the future when the next ice age has forced all life to retreat to a central landmass--based in Africa—which is named ifrik in the book. 

The two mahonti kids—a sister, and a younger brother find themselves separated from their parents and with the rock people one night. And the person who brought them there instructs them to change their names and be called Mara and Dan from then onwards. An old woman identified Daima takes in Mara and Dann and put all her effort into bringing them up and showing them the ways to survive in the rural village of rock people where resources are so limited and people are very rough. 

As Daima explains it and as we see when the story proceeds, the harder the things are the more people fight. As time passes things get worse, the whole of their village dies or moves away due to the scarcity of food and water and we see the brother and sister joining the migration for survival to the north. In the course of the journey, they get separated more than once, gets entangled in different kinds of human settlements, gets caught between warring armies and dodges various kinds of dangers.

How to separate important from unimportant facts and how to accept the present as the only dimension we can shape directly?

The Story was very evocative in its descriptions of the terrain, culture, and lives of those in Ifrik/ Africa. It all felt very well defined and visual. I think this was its strongest point. The description of the world and the decayed and dying civilizations were really lovely. I felt the terror and awful loss. And to be honest, most of these cultures were just as bad and terrifying as what we have now. I have to say I kept hoping for more glimpses of what happened, and how the other cultures had come to be, particularly the one that made all the indestructible things. But there was enough to keep me interested. 

                                      Mara and Dann's map of "Ifrik" (Africa) from Doris Lessing

Mara was an interesting character. She was intelligent and wanted to know how the world around her worked. Her greatest flaw thought was that she was one of the most passive characters ever. In a line with Evelyn Waugh's male protagonists. She had no desires and no goals, beyond simply learning about the past. The only time I can think of in the entire book when she did something active, was when she took her cow to get mated when she was still a young girl. Her entire adult life, once her brother returned was following him or being placed in one situation after another. Apart from hunger she never faced any danger as wherever she went, be it a brothel, slave traders, army everyone loved her and tried to protect her. She seemed to happily, or unhappily, floats from situation to situation without any initiative or drive. 

She never tried to escape, or act to change anything about her life. It was frankly a little odd. Also, perhaps partly because of this, she seemed not to develop as a character, despite the trauma she'd been through. This trauma had an obvious and devastating effect on her brother Dann, who seemed to bear the brunt of most of it, and as such, he grew and changed and became much more complex. Perhaps Mara was supposed to represent the passive female ideal because at times she felt more like a stereotype than a person. Dann, on the other hand, was much more driven, and never gave up his ideal to go north. 

Well except for that whole destruction with the opium addiction and then later with the gambling. But he was very active and caring, despite his callous nature towards the other slaves and refugees. It was interesting to see how he was so much more affected by everything, from the events of their original fleeing from their home to his life as a slave. I felt that the only thing that was brushed aside was his life in the military as a general, and how quickly he was able to give that up to continue his search north.

Finally, the book is worth reading for the sheer imagination that went into creating a world where all the advancements of human society as we know now is a distant memory and for the epic nature of the adventures that Mara and Dann face on their journey.