I am terrible at writing reviews of anything. I can tell you if I enjoyed a book, and I can tell you about what it make me think about. You’ll never find me discussing the plot because, mostly, that doesn’t interest me. However, I do feel the need to try writing about Doris Lessing‘s “The Grass is Singing.”

Published in 1950 “The Grass is Singing” is the story of Mary Turner, a woman living in Rhodesia during the late 1940s. The primary focus of the novel is the racial politics between whites and blacks, as well as the utter and absolute mundane nature of Mary’s life in poverty married to an unsuccessful farmer.

It starts with the murder of Mary in the first chapter with each subsequent chapter a flashback until we reach the murder. We are shown Mary’s childhood and life before she met her husband. We are shown daily life on the farm, and we are given an overall impression of Mary’s horrible attitude towards black people and towards her husband’s farm. It can be said that Mary and her story are not sympathetic to modern readers.

Neither, I suspect, was it a sympathetic tale for most readers in 1950s England and America.

But that’s not the point of this book. Not every story has to be conflict driven with likeable characters. Doris Lessing’s first novel shows a real command of language which allows us to forget many of the commercial crutches that lesser writers are forced to rely on. (She would later go onto to win the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.) This novel is an expression of literary realism. The sole focus of “The Grass is Singing” is an exploration of Mary’s life and death with no diversions into magical realism and no attempts at humour.

It is not an enjoyable book. It is not a light read. It is not escapism.

It is, however, compelling and fascinating. It is also depicting a society far more alien than most science fiction novels.

“The Grass is Singing” is alien because it shows a society which from our privilege position in a world after decolonisations utterly abhorrent to contemporary opinion. It is an honest snapshot of a time. It makes no attempt to justify or to denounce the actions and thoughts of the characters in the novel. It lets us do that.

I would not suggest this book to readers expecting instant gratification. What “The Grass is Singing” provides best as an experience is a carefully written window into a radically different place in human history.

These are just my first impressions because I only finished reading the last book not very long ago. About an hour ago. I deliberately haven’t given myself much time to reflect on the book and the series as a whole, but I have also read the previous five volumes in the previous twenty-four hours. So I think I’ve got quite a good handle on what’s going on in the last volume.

Well the art is very good. The thick black lines and the lack of detail drawn by Brian Lee O’Malley convey all of the emotion and drama required without cluttering the page. The only problem with the art I have in ‘Scott Pilgrim’, and this has been fixed to some extent in the ‘Finest Hour’, is that many of the characters are hard to tell apart because of the lack of features which sets them apart. Also the layouts in previous volumes were often confusing, but over over the six books O’Malley has become a real master at designing the perfect page. There is some really smart uses of negative space in this book to portray motion and scale. Oh yes the writing is also sharp and witty.
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‘Ill Met in Lankmar’ is a Hugo and Nebula award winning novella written by Fritz Leiber, first published in 1970, and it is what fantasy fiction is supposed to be. This is the experience I expect from sword and sorcery fiction.

The story is a prequel to thirty years of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories written in the prior to this story. The duo, a combination of a tall northern barbarian, Fafhrd, and a small former wizard’s apprentice, Mouser, are both human characters who conform to none of the lazy stereotypes which my quick description of the two might suggest. Both characters are portrayed having the same interest in boozing, fighting and womanising as well as being of equal intelligence and ability.

We start the novella with an account of Grey Mouser and Fafhrd meeting as they both steal from the thieves guild who are also in the process of thieving. After a few scenes of frivolity in their victory, the two at the insistence of Vlana, the woman Fafhrd promised to take revenge on the thieves guild for, drunkenly decided to infiltrate the headquarters of the thieves guild. From here the story rapidly descends into a horror and revenge which I won’t spoil.

The description of the city of Lankmar exist not to damn the urban environment which they inhabit and romanticise an idyllic countryside, but to celebrate the rich life within cities. There is little sentimental about Leiber’s portrayal of Lankmar, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser’s actions, but neither is there a sense of strident doom which could exist in this novella, as Fritz Leiber writes playfully and with charm firmly placing ‘Ill Met in Lankmar’ in the Errol Flynn tradition of swashbuckling.

The front cover quote on my 1988 edition of Swords & Deviltry by Micheal Moorecock declares Fritz Leiber, “The best living American fantasy writer” which is apt, as even though he died in 1992 his prose still outshines most fantasy writers working today. Highly recommend that you find an anthology which contains this story.