[In the following review, Clark faults Lessing's characterization and prose style in Mara and Dann.]

When Doris Lessing subtitles a book An adventure, you know that the stories that follow will not fit neatly into an existing picaresque tradition, in spite of the author's note and its proclaimed intention to reprise “the oldest story in Europe”—which ends with the words “and they lived happily ever after”. It is far more likely that the adventure will be something of an endurance test for its characters, a backdrop against which Lessing can, with characteristic expansiveness, explore further her abiding interests in the nature of personal freedom, social responsibility, destiny and the relentless march of history into the terrifying abyss of the future.

So it is with Mara and Dann, which takes us thousands of years into that future. As we might expect, it has a post-apocalyptic flavour, although, in this imagined world, catastrophe has been the result of climate change, rather than the human-made Epoch of Destruction that closed The Four-Gated City, the last in Lessing's five-novel “Children of Violence” sequence. Here, the whole of Europe (called Yerrup) and the Northern Hemisphere are buried in ice, their cities and civilizations, their societies and peoples gone, leaving barely a trace behind. The world's population is now concentrated in Ifrik, where different tribes exist in a state of technological and cultural backwardness, married to linguistic and social advancement.

The novel opens with intrigue, and with the medieval flavour that comes with the transposed atmospheres of futuristic fiction; the child, Mara, and her infant brother, Dann, are being taken with stealth from the palace where they live, on a long and dangerous journey across cracked earth and flooded rivers. Mara and Dann are told over and over again by their adult chaperones that they must forget their previous identities, and that their lives are in danger. They are taken to a house made of rock, in a village made of rock, inhabited by the Rock People, and called, appropriately enough, the Rock Village. They themselves are not Rock People, they are People, and they are delivered into the care of an elderly woman called Daima.

Life is almost impossibly hard, revolving around the twin facts of water and food shortage and the hostility of the Rock People to the exiled People. This is a recurrent theme in Lessing's fiction, whatever its setting; her protagonists endure mental, physical and emotional hardship and, through enduring, come to a new understanding of reality and necessity. For Mara, the world shrinks to the daily imperative of finding water, dodging the scorpions, protecting her small brother, remembering to forget her name and fending off the evil attentions of one of the Rock People, Kulik. To make her existence more bearable, she and Daima play a game called What Did You See?, in which the observation of external reality leads to a kind of incremental piecing together of the world.

Lessing values toughness, both psychological and physical, and a lack of sentimentality which would otherwise hamper one's apprehension of reality. Mara's toughness is contrasted throughout the book with Dann's, which is of a much less intellectually subtle or discerning variety. Part of this is explained by the trauma Dann has suffered as a small child; he has conceived a neurotic fear of people who look the same, which later manifests itself in a kind of schizophrenia, or paranoid splitting of the world into friend or enemy. Part of it, however, is also explained by Lessing's belief in the power of women to face, and thus renew and regenerate, the life around them—and her continuing attempt to provide a corrective to male survivalist fiction. In that respect, Mara is a direct descendant of Martha Quest.

The children stay in the Rock Village for most of their childhood. When fire comes to destroy the Rock Village, they begin the long journey which occupies the rest of the novel, always pushing north, towards the empty Middle Sea and the frozen edges of Yerrup. What impels them northward they do not really know: only endless reports that life is better the further up Ifrik they proceed. Their movement is also guided by a vague sense of destiny, and by the increasing feeling that their progress is being charted by a network of watchers and listeners.

As Mara and Dann pass through Ifrik, we seem to be offered a post-holocaust story played out in a different setting, and with different results. There are feudal societies galore; at one point the pair end up in a community in which the slaves, through a cunning passivity, have bested their masters, who spend the days off their heads on poppy and ganga. That society also has a fertility crisis which requires a reformulation of the relations between men and women. There is the threat of war; Mara and Dann are enlisted in a brutal struggle between two clans, neither of whom know why they are fighting.

Moreover, there is the constant interrogation of history for clues as to the nature of the civilizations lost. Much of this is clumsily achieved, with disbelieving rumours of “machines that could carry a hundred people at a time”, the eco-pious judgment that “They spoiled everything they touched”, and recovered literature which includes Mam Bova, Ankrena and Rom and Jull. The last in that list, with its temple scene, prompts a discussion of God:

“What was a temple?”

“It was a place where they kept their God.”

“What was God?”

“An invisible being who controlled their lives.”

This caused a good deal of merriment.

And there you have it: the human impulse towards the religious explained in five lines, and consigned, along with the rest of Western civilization, to an icy grave. No matter, then, that these human beings are, in other respects, familiar, that their language, thought patterns and emotions are not much different to ours, even though they exist without gods or legends, myths or literature. Nor, that Lessing's Ifrik is populated by a highly Western sensibility.

This kind of contradiction eventually weakens Mara and Dann, and cannot be resolved by a flight into the folkloric. It is full of talismans and portents, mythical journeys up rivers and through divided towns, trials through which the protagonists must come in order to proceed to the next stage of understanding. Bizarrely, one aspect of that understanding appears to be their sexual attraction for one another, acknowledged towards the very end of the book, as if Lessing seeks to presage yet another development in the structure of human relations.

But by far the greatest problem of the book—which is, in the end, a minor work by an extraordinary writer—is the laziness of the writing. Descriptions run for pages, failing to convince the reader of their need to be there; dialogue hands limply between the characters; the narrative, while ostensibly following the course of Mara and Dann's journey, heads ceaselessly towards dead ends and shows no great desire to avoid them. Doris Lessing has always been tempted by the very long narrative, as if to give free rein to her ideas without being hampered by the spurious demands of style or economy: in this novel, she may have over-played her hand.