There is a passion here, a piercing accuracy of progressive despair that is astonishing in so young a writer. Tortured by her own shortcomings, she took it out of the Bantu servants around her, and particularly the boy Moses. She was a misfit, who had had no business marrying a farmer and immuring himself in the isolation of the The story closes with the act of the murder itself, and in between we are shown just why unhappy, neurotic Mary Turner brought tragedy upon herself.

There is no mystery about the culprit: when the police arrive on the farm a burly Bantu calmly gives himself up.

The story opens in a manner reminiscent of early Maugham, with the newspaper announcement of a white woman's murder on the veld. It is a painful picture of a woman's failure, in which the drama and conflict are mostly internal. 'The Grass is Singing' (a phrase from 'The Waste Land') is neither entertaining Yet no impartialĬritic can fail to overlook the depth and maturity of this remarkable psychological study by a writer hitherto unknown even in her own country. O many South African novels of distinction have appeared here in the past two years that one is diffident about hailing still another. SeptemTragedy on the Veld By JOHN BARKHAM

Doris lessing the grass is singing