Mara and Dann: An Adventure [Paperback]

Doris Lessing (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 22, 1999

Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven-year old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Question: What do Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear and Doris Lessing's Mara and Dann have in common? Answer: an ice age. Not the same ice age, of course--Auel's series of prehistoric adventures took place 35,000 years ago, during the last global freeze; Lessing's tale, on the other hand, is set several thousand years in the future, during the next one. Nevertheless, both books are concerned with profound shifts in the development of humankind. In Lessing's imagined world, the Northern Hemisphere is completely covered with ice and humanity has retreated south. In a land called Ifrik, young Mara and her even younger brother, Dann, are kidnapped one night from their family home and taken to live among strangers: "The scene that the child, then the girl, then the young woman tried so hard to remember was clear enough in its beginnings. She had been hustled--sometimes carried, sometimes pulled along by the hand--through a dark night, nothing to be seen but stars, and then she was pushed into a room and told, Keep quiet." We soon learn that the children have been stolen for their own good, though it will be some time before we discover why. Growing up in a drought-parched land, Mara and Dann learn at an early age how to survive both the hostile environment and enemy peoples.

Eventually, conditions grow so bad in Ifrik that an entire continent of people begin a great northern migration. As Mara and Dann walk the length of the land, Lessing takes the opportunity to comment on the lost cities and vanished civilizations whose remains dot the landscape. That these ancient ruins belong to our civilization makes Mara's curiosity about them resonate eerily. Danger dogs every step; the children are captured by different, warring groups and their destinies take very different paths. A political novelist first and foremost, Lessing uses her futuristic fable to comment on the sins and foibles of humanity as it is now--on war and slavery, sexism and racism--and on its one saving grace, the ability to love. --Margaret Prior --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Tenderly perceptive, Lessing's first far-future novel since her celebrated Canopus in Argos: Archives series of the late 1970s-mid '80s features two appealing orphans precariously reaching adulthood on Earth thousands of years from now. The Ice Age brought on by the ecological rapaciousness of today's society is receding, bringing lethal drought to the Southern land of "Ifric," where a power struggle in her family has stranded seven-year-old Mara, who is fiercely caring for her even younger brother, Dann, in a remote village of neo-Neanderthals. Even under desperate conditions, Mara's thirst for knowledge outpaces the thirst for water that, over the years, drives her?sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by Dann, who as he grows up insists on following his own dreams?toward the icy North, where remnants of Earth's old technological glories await. She and Dann endure numerous hardships and adventures along the way: Dann becomes addicted to "the poppy" and gambles Mara away on a roll of the dice; Mara works as a spy and is kidnapped to be a "breeder." Lessing spins a glowing hymn to human endurance around the sweet, shrewd, indefatigable Mara, one of her most engaging heroines. Though Lessing sanitizes Voltaire's savage satire of Western civilization here, her innocent-but-canny Mara proves as effective as Candide at surviving the worst and celebrating the best that human beings can do to one another. This novel is a resounding affirmation of humanity and what it holds dearest, from one of our most gifted storytellers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; First HarperPerennial Edition edition (December 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006093056X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060930561
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,110,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Both a tale of adventure and a commentary on human progress, July 1, 2004

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mara and Dann: An Adventure (Hardcover)

A great fan both of Doris Lessing and of science fiction, I have no idea how the publication of this book escaped my attention: it's a marvel. Lessing has visited the future before, in her five-volume Canopus in Argos series, but this book bears little resemblance to her earlier opus. Sporting less philosophy and more "adventure" (and not as challenging to read as many of Lessing's books), the novel seems aimed at a broader audience; I even suspect she may have written this story with the "young adult" market in mind.

Set in Africa thousands of years in the future, after cataclysmic events have destroyed civilization and towards the end of a new Ice Age, the novel certainly boasts plenty of coy references to fossilized and bastardized remnants of our own era. Yet, in spite of its futuristic veneer, "Mara and Dann" has more in common with many fantasy novels than with science fiction. Lessing's plot is modeled after a sword-and-dragon tale: their parents slaughtered, siblings Mara and Dann are spirited away from their homeland during the calamities prompted by an unrelenting famine and drought. As the heat wave advances north, they flee up the continent, searching for a new paradise.

Some of the reviews in the press fault the book for being repetitious, and those notices may have, unfortunately, turned off some readers. The New York Times, for example, assigned two inappropriate reviewers: for the daily paper, a critic who has shown a recurring and predictable hostility towards "literary" sci-fi/fantasy novels (and who, if she in fact did read Lessing's Canopus series, certainly doesn't remember as much of it as she pretends) and, in the Sunday Times, a little-known novelist and admirer of Doris Lessing's more "realist" novels who seems never to have read post-apocalyptic fiction at all.

On the surface, their chief criticism is correct: like many fantasy novels, this one employs a cyclical rhythm in its presentation of Mara and Dann's escapades--new locale, followed by capture or separation, then dangers and threats, ending with flight or escape. Although the story doesn't start with "Once upon a time," Lessing admits in her introduction that the characters in this "reworking of a very old tale" end up "happily ever after." But the critics entirely miss the allegorical (and, yes, political) undercurrent: as the two survivors travel north and each civilization they encounter becomes more "advanced," individual liberties deteriorate in more elaborate--and more troubling--ways. While journeying through a continent, Mara and Dann progress from the tribal culture of the Stone Age to the mercantile society of the Middle Ages. Their adventures may resemble each other in kind but definitely not in degree, and they "live happily ever after" only when they escape the trappings of "civilization" and accept an arrangement that values individual freedom over collective subjugation.

One could argue further that Lessing has created a microcosm of human history, but she's also managed to tell a great story. Indeed, instead of finding the book monotonous or slow-paced, I (like many other readers) couldn't put it down.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adventure Of The Soul--A Classic!, November 16, 2002

By 

Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" (Lexington, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mara and Dann: An Adventure (Paperback)

A little girl and her baby brother are suddenly ripped from a life of ease and safety and thrust into a life-long adventure, fleeing for their lives in a world gone mad. Lawlessness and social disintegration run rampant, hard on the heels of pervasive drought which will soon make their world uninhabitable. The story takes place far in the future, in a continent called Ifrik (Africa), at a time when our present civilization is buried beneath a new ice age.

How will the brother and sister survive? How will they change? What is the meaning behind their incredible adventures? As they move slowly and painfully north, from one disastrous situation to another, North becomes a metaphor for everyone's search--the place where things will somehow be better. The place where life will have meaning. As always, Lessing is creating more than an adventure; it is also a commentary on the human condition, on the rise and fall of civilization, on the desperate human wish to ignore bad news and cling to a comfortable present, on the thoughtless destruction of the environment, on meaningless cruelty, on tribalism, on hope and hopelessness.

It takes a little effort to get started, to travel this hot, dry, dusty road with Mara and Dann, but the adventure soon takes hold of you and draws you onward. You also have to go North. This book is a masterpiece.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a Movie This Would Make!, June 5, 1999

By 

Sheldon S. Kohn - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mara and Dann: An Adventure (Hardcover)

Doris Lessing is writing some wonderful books these days, and Mara and Dann is one of her most interesting tales. My initial impression is that this book holds it own with some of her masterpieces. Suffice it to say that it is simply wonderful.

Mrs. Lessing's strong imagination and narrative control results in a fully developed future world that reads more like history than science fiction. The novel is set at the presumptive beginning of the end of an ice age far in the future. We follow Mara and Dann, the two protagonists, on their quest from drought-stricken south central Ifrik, what we call Africa, towards the undefined North. A permanent drought has developed where they live, and the region no longer supports human life. The North becomes the symbolic goal of their quest, an undefined something where things simply have to be better. This is an heroic quest, but the characters are seeking a life, not a throne.

The book is brutal, and the characters live unforgiving lives. In a time when there is not enough, people steal basic necessities from others and look upon death in a roadway as just another part of life. Children die, are left in the desert, and no one grieves for them. Ifrik is changing so that only insects and reptiles thrive. Humans have changed inexplicably, but the protagonists have no frame of reference to explain what is different. Some groups seem almost Neanderthal, living in caves and rock villages, and some villages contain only people who are exact copies of each other.

As the characters move North on their quest, they pass through many cities, towns, and villages. There are moderately benign states that ignore the expanding drought to their ultimate detriment. There are river towns that live in more or less anarchy. There are states ruled by incredibly stupid generals. There are frontier cities where money is still the most important thing and women can be won and lost at dice. The pictures Lessing paints of these different ways of life is for me the most fascinating aspect of the book.

Mrs. Lessing continues to amaze me with the range and depth of her talents. "What did you see?" I saw a world that is hard to forget.

HIGHLY recommended.