编辑推荐Amazon.com Review
Question: What do Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear and Doris Lessing's Mara and Dann have in common? Answer: an ice age. Not the same ice age, of course--Auel's series of prehistoric adventures took place 35,000 years ago, during the last global freeze; Lessing's tale, on the other hand, is set several thousand years in the future, during the next one. Nevertheless, both books are concerned with profound shifts in the development of humankind. In Lessing's imagined world, the Northern Hemisphere is completely covered with ice and humanity has retreated south. In a land called Ifrik, young Mara and her even younger brother, Dann, are kidnapped one night from their family home and taken to live among strangers: "The scene that the child, then the girl, then the young woman tried so hard to remember was clear enough in its beginnings. She had been hustled--sometimes carried, sometimes pulled along by the hand--through a dark night, nothing to be seen but stars, and then she was pushed into a room and told, Keep quiet." We soon learn that the children have been stolen for their own good, though it will be some time before we discover why. Growing up in a drought-parched land, Mara and Dann learn at an early age how to survive both the hostile environment and enemy peoples. Eventually, conditions grow so bad in Ifrik that an entire continent of people begin a great northern migration. As Mara and Dann walk the length of the land, Lessing takes the opportunity to comment on the lost cities and vanished civilizations whose remains dot the landscape. That these ancient ruins belong to our civilization makes Mara's curiosity about them resonate eerily. Danger dogs every step; the children are captured by different, warring groups and their destinies take very different paths. A political novelist first and foremost, Lessing uses her futuristic fable to comment on the sins and foibles of humanity as it is now--on war and slavery, sexism and racism--and on its one saving grace, the ability to love. --Margaret Prior--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Tenderly perceptive, Lessing's first far-future novel since her celebrated Canopus in Argos: Archives series of the late 1970s-mid '80s features two appealing orphans precariously reaching adulthood on Earth thousands of years from now. The Ice Age brought on by the ecological rapaciousness of today's society is receding, bringing lethal drought to the Southern land of "Ifric," where a power struggle in her family has stranded seven-year-old Mara, who is fiercely caring for her even younger brother, Dann, in a remote village of neo-Neanderthals. Even under desperate conditions, Mara's thirst for knowledge outpaces the thirst for water that, over the years, drives her?sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by Dann, who as he grows up insists on following his own dreams?toward the icy North, where remnants of Earth's old technological glories await. She and Dann endure numerous hardships and adventures along the way: Dann becomes addicted to "the poppy" and gambles Mara away on a roll of the dice; Mara works as a spy and is kidnapped to be a "breeder." Lessing spins a glowing hymn to human endurance around the sweet, shrewd, indefatigable Mara, one of her most engaging heroines. Though Lessing sanitizes Voltaire's savage satire of Western civilization here, her innocent-but-canny Mara proves as effective as Candide at surviving the worst and celebrating the best that human beings can do to one another. This novel is a resounding affirmation of humanity and what it holds dearest, from one of our most gifted storytellers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Mara and her brother Dann are abducted as children and raised by strangers in Ifrick, or Southern Africa, thousands of years in the future. All traces of the technological society of the 20th century have been obliterated by the advance of glaciers that cover most of Europe. The ice cap is finally retreating, but as global warming opens new lands in the north, it also turns the south into a barren desert. Mara and Dann join the great migration to Yerrup, encountering outposts of culture where ancient artifacts are preserved. Mara's insatiable curiosity about these things supplies most of the background for this adult fairy tale. The book's pacing is painfully slow, but the obsessive level of detail may indicate the author's personal involvement: there are obviously some elements of autobiography here. This long novel misses the mark as an adventure story, but it may appeal to diehard Lessing fans. For larger fiction collections.?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Lessings 22nd novel, a dystopian allegory set in ``Ifrik'' (formerly Africa) thousands of years hence, is a ponderous, hectoring, fascinating second cousin to her Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) and The Four-Gated City (1969) (and quite reminiscent, incidentally, of Norman Mailer's similarly forbidding Ancient Evenings). After a global war and second Ice Age have decimated the continent and a more recent drought has made ``civilization'' only a distant memory, two children, seven-year-old Mara and her younger brother Dann, are abducted and forced to join a slow northward migration, toward water and the remnants of destroyed cities. As they grow to adulthood, together and apart, both are subjected to numbingly repetitive ordeals: capture by conflicting ``armies''; enslavement for various purposes (Dann suffers both drug addiction and homosexual rape, while Mara is exploited as a spy and as a ``breeder''); and hairbreadth escapes (rather too many) from their several oppressors. Eventually reaching a northern territory where specific knowledge of their culture's past is available, Mara and Dann learn the secret of their own originand the duty they were born for but now reject. Neither plot nor characterization is Lessing's strongest suit, and the story's climactic developments may strike some readers as willful overkill, but this often frustratingly turgid tale generates considerable power nevertheless. The world Lessing's opaque protagonists inhabit has been imagined in weirdly convincing detail: cities (``as temporary as dreams'') lie drowned beneath scarce remaining rivers, which run shallow and are infested with ``water dragons'' (crocodiles) and other exotic predators; men struggle for dominion over exhausted land; and women scheme to outwit male ``rulers.'' The powerful, almost erotic attraction between brother and sister is virtually palpableas are Mara's fierce hungers: to give birth, be loved, and learn the history of the world crumbling around her. As demanding and intermittently infuriating as anything Lessing has ever writtenand as necessary. She isn't a stylist, and she takes no prisoners, but this writer remains one of contemporary fiction's genuine thinkers and visionaries, and it would be folly to ignore her. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"A substantial achievement, the latest remarkable book from a seemingly inexhaustible writer." -- -- Boston Globe
"Provocative and stimulating." -- Los Angeles Time
"Provocative and stimulating." -- Los Angeles Time
"Tenderly perceptive....A resounding affirmation of humanity and what it holds dearest, from one of our most gifted storytellers." -- Publishers Weekly
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