Taken aback, his only remark to Mary about the incident serves only to heighten the bizarreness of the situation: The strangeness of the incident is highlighted by showing it from the viewpoint of Tony, newly arrived from England. The attitude of the native was of an indulgent uxoriousness. Moses was buttoning up her dress she was looking in the mirror. Beside her stood Moses, and, as Tony watched, she stood up and held out her arms while the native slipped her dress over them from behind.When she sat down again she shook out her hair from her neck with both hands, with the gesture of a beautiful woman adoring her beauty. She was in a garish pink petticoat, and her bony yellow shoulders stuck sharply out of it. Mary was sitting on an upended candle box before the square of mirror nailed on the wall. Instead, MaryвЂ™s relationship with Moses is shown only through one scene described through the eyes of anotherВ character: In offering us the truth rather than the facts of the case, Lessing leaves out the details of what might be considered the two essential events of the novel: she does not tell us the sexual details of MaryвЂ™s relationship with Moses, and she leaves out the details of MosesвЂ™ murder of Mary. Isolated and unhappy on his farm, Mary begins to break down mentally, to the point where she behaves in a way unthinkable to white Rhodesian society of the time and breaks the colour bar, forming a strange and dysfunctional relationship with Moses. Mary has married unhappily her husband Dick is a poor and incompetent farmer in the Rhodesian veldt. Lessing gives us the вЂfactsвЂ™ of the case as set out in the newspaper report of the incident, and then proceeds to examine what she sees as the вЂtruthвЂ™ of the situation. The novel begins with the murdered body of Mary Turner, killed by her black house servant Moses. The surprise on rereading it is how much of the novel is taken up with the mental disintegration of the centralВ characterВ andВ the way in which Lessing shows that mental breakdown as being intertwined with the political situation of the white colonialist farmers. I havenвЂ™t read it in some years and remembered it as a fairly straightforward novel about the colour bar in colonial Rhodesia. The above passage, from LessingвЂ™s The golden notebook, marks out what is really interesting about The grass is singing. If Marxism means anything, it means that a little novel about the emotions should reflect вЂњwhatвЂ™s realвЂќ since the emotions are a function and a product of a society вЂ¦вЂ™.

God knows what that remark means, I donвЂ™t.

You write about whatвЂ™s real.вЂ™ДЄnna almost laughed again, and then said soberly: вЂDo you realize how many of the things we say are just echoes? That remark youвЂ™ve just made is an echo from Communist Party criticism - at its worst moments, moreover. вЂ After all, you arenвЂ™t someone who writes little novels about the emotions.

The grass is singing characters