[In the following review, Knapp focuses on the heroine's role in the narrative development of Mara and Dann.]

As if to insist on a perspective that makes the year 2000 appear trivial, Doris Lessing's last novel of the twentieth century [Mara and Dann] looks forward by several thousand years and is set in the next ice age. The civilization of Western Europe (known here as “Yerrup”) has long since been obliterated by glaciers, and the Mediterranean Sea is empty. Human life, pushed southward on the continent now known as Ifrik (Africa), has been reduced to a few primitive tribes who are warring for control of the habitable regions, while also struggling for survival against drought and plagues.

Lessing's futuristic Odyssey opens with the kidnapping of two children from their village, during which four-year-old Dann is traumatized for life by a “bad man” named Kulik, while Mara is instilled with her lifelong mission to protect Dann from further harm. They are taken in and raised for five years by a kindly old woman, Daima, a “memory” who passes on her store of vital knowledge to this next generation. When Daima dies, Mara and Dann begin a dangerous journey toward the North, though unsure of their destination or even why they are fugitives. They face giant lizards and spiders, are attacked and kidnapped, and avert starvation by eating grubs and scorpions. Finally, they are captured and sold as slaves for breeding (being of the Mahondi tribe, considered to be genetically superior). During their seemingly endless chain of perils, they are separated many times but always manage to reunite and continue their trek northward. Only at one point do they settle down for a few months with tribal kin, and Mara has a sweet but brief taste of the normal domestic life for which she yearns throughout the book.

When Mara and Dann finally arrive at their goal near the Mediterranean Sea (which is now refilling as the glaciers recede), it is revealed that they are the last prince and princess of a ruling tribe. They are asked to bear children together to reestablish the Mahondi empire, an idea Mara wisely rejects. The book's final scene, strangely reminiscent of The Golden Notebook, shows them gathered with their close friends on a sunny veranda, musing idly and nostalgic for their nomadic days.

The adventures themselves, while of a certain grotesque interest, lead our heroes in circles and are frustratingly repetitive. Any real development is propelled by the brother-sister relationship and by Mara's vulnerable emotions. It is significant that Lessing's only sibling was a younger brother: Mara's deep, yearning protectiveness toward Dann is at the vortex of her inner world and drives the external action as well. Time and again she sets out into mortal danger to rescue Dann, who, for his part, remains flat and does not mature much beyond the terrified little boy of the first chapter. Opportunistic and self-serving, he abandons Mara repeatedly and at one point even gambles her into slavery. But Mara's loyalty, with incestuous undertones reminiscent of the earlier Lessing story “Each Other,” is unshakable.

Mara herself is a reluctant heroine, an ice-age Martha Quest who rarely has the luxury to pursue a higher understanding of herself as a woman and the world in which she lives, since her energy is consumed with sheer survival. The reader familiar with Lessing's many characters in survival situations will seek signs of probing intellect (The Golden Notebook), spiritual transcendence (Marriages), or defiance (If the Old Could). Mara, however, not wanting to change the world if she can just watch it go by from a safe place, is as unable to challenge her environment as was Mary Turner in the 1950 novel The Grass Is Singing. With her very small personal voice, Mara brings fifty years of Lessing heroines full circle.