Product Description

Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization. With his trusted companions—Mara's daughter, his hope for the future; the abandoned child-soldier Griot, who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories; and the snow dog, a faithful friend who brings him back from the depths of despair—Dann embarks on a strange and captivating adventure in a suddenly colder, more watery climate in the north.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #732486 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Released on: 2006-12-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This sequel to Lessing's futuristic novel Mara and Dann continues the saga of Dann, the refugee boy prince of the Mahondi, who searched with his older sister Mara for habitable land on a planet Earth beset by a new ice age. Several characters from that novel reappear, including Griot, a soldier who served under Dann, but Mara has died in childbirth. Grief deafens General Dann to the pleas of those who believe he alone can save civilization from the warring chaos of displaced populations. Lessing's long literary career includes much science fiction (the Canopus in Argos series), but this dystopia, underscored by its reluctant hero's existential dilemma—why go on just to go on?—resembles a classical myth, albeit one with no gods to intervene. As Dann disastrously tries to assuage his grief with opium, loyal Griot raises an army and finds a repository of books that preserves the wisdom of lost civilizations. Less of an adventure story than its predecessor, this sequel requires patience through several repetitive passages devoted to Dann's refusal to act. But that is a small price to pay for Lessing's acute observations. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Doris Lessing imagines a bleak future. Ice has crushed Europe, its people fleeing south to Africa, where drought and famine prey on everyone. Europe becomes Yerrup, Africa becomes Ifrik, and civilization devolves. Everything is forgotten: how to make machines, how to read books, how to learn, how to create. Only survival matters in this newly primitive world.

Lessing first wrote about Ifrik seven years ago in Mara and Dann, which follows a young brother and sister on a desperate trip from the south of the continent to the north, where conditions are said to have improved. That novel is subtitled "An Adventure," and it is full of kidnappings, narrow escapes, desperate (dare I say incestuous?) love and misshapen villains.

The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog is a different sort of book, not least because its title outweighs its contents. The classic simplicity of the first novel -- a brother and sister searching for safety -- is replaced by angst-ridden ramblings, and the high seriousness with which Lessing clearly takes her work is unleavened by stirring plot points.

The story begins where Mara and Dann ends: Brother and sister have found comfortable refuge with their lovers on a farm far to the north. But Dann discovers that peace -- and seeing his sister with another man -- can be unsettling. He flees to the nearby Centre, a palace complex with a secret stash of long-lost knowledge. He is followed by Griot. Dann led an army during one of the longer stops along his northern journey, and Griot, a loyal soldier, expects him to do it again. Refugees are streaming into the Centre, in the hope that Dann will be the one finally to establish a country where they can rest and prosper.

Yet Dann's sense of history -- his own and the dimly recalled tales of dead civilizations -- paralyzes him. "Over and over again, all the effort and the fighting and the hoping, but it ends in the Ice, or in cities sinking down out of sight into the mud," he laments. And laments. And laments some more. And when he gets the news that Mara has died giving birth to a daughter, he goes mad. He is brought back to health and sanity by the love of a good dog and Griot's determination that Dann should do what the people expect of him. Eventually, with minimal drama, he does, establishing a peaceable kingdom in nearby Tundra.

Any novel about a depressed person, even one set in an imagined world, can be tedious at times. Lessing's Ifrik -- with its bands of emaciated and glassy-eyed refugees, its communities willfully blind to the calamities of war and drought that stalk them, its dearth of gentleness -- is the more compelling character here, one worth meeting as we ponder what our own climate change has in store for us.

Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
In Mara and Dann (1999), the orphaned brother and sister survive their perilous adventure as they slog across the devastated continent of Ifrik thousands of years in the future, and they finally separate knowing that their passion cannot be consummated. Now Dann is grief-stricken to learn that his sister has died in childbirth. A respected general, he has left his own demonic wife and child, but he meets up with Mara's child, Tamar, and loves her as his own, training her to take over as leader of his people. The intimate family connection, the "passionate shyness," is exquisitely rendered. Unfortunately, Tamar only arrives three-quarters of the way through the story. To get there, one must slog through endless generic journeys in a future world destroyed by drought, floods, ice, and mud, with armies of refugees fleeing war and famine. Of course, the message does connect with the dire warnings in today's disasters. But the drama is in the personal, not only Dann's family but also his bond with his loyal snow dog and his friendship with his army officer Griot. Clearly there is plenty more to come. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Impressive New Novel of a Far Future Earth from Doris Lessing
In "the Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and The Snow Dog", acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing has rendered a most captivating tale about friendship, loss and love, set sometime in Planet Earth's distant future; a time when the world has been plunged anew in yet another great Ice Age that has entombed much of the Northern Hemisphere in great ice sheets. Humanity's great cities are but a distant, almost forgotten, memory, buried under these thick ice sheets or submerged in seas and oceans. In her latest novel, a sequel to her 1999 "Mara and Dann", Lessing focuses upon the trials and tribulations of the adult Dann, now General Dann, and the leader of a great army in the barren wastes of northern Africa. Dann must contend with news of the sudden, tragic death of his sister Mara, and comes to terms with her newborn daughter, and with his own wife and newborn child. It is an emotional, intensely psychological journey that Dann undertakes, and one in which he nearly fails, over the course of years that are so elegantly collapsed within the relatively terse confines of Lessing's novel. Lessing's prose has never been better, and she has crafted such a mesmerizing tale that I found almost impossible to set aside, even for brief moments of time. For those wondering why Doris Lessing deserved the Nobel Prize for her excellent science fiction and fantasy literature, then reading this elegant little novel may provide you with some intriguing, perhaps delightful, answers.

The worlds of ghosts
"Mara and Dann," this tale's haunting predecessor (and, I think, one of Lessing's most powerful and imaginative and accessible books), followed its brother-and-sister heroes as they traversed the African continent at the end of an Ice Age many millennia in the future. Their harrowing adventures brought them to a farm within walking distance of the Rocky Gates (Straits of Gibraltar), the Western Sea (Atlantic), and the rapidly filling cavernous expanse of the Middle Sea (Mediterranean).

The sequel begins nine months later, when Dann decides to fulfill his dream of exploring the Middle Sea to see for himself the ice-covered continent of Europe and ultimately to confront the demons that assailed him during his trek through the desert. The subsequent narrative expands upon two subjects from the first book: the lust for knowledge that fueled Mara and Dann's transcontinental journey and the drug-stimulated schizophrenia that inexorably worsens Dann's ability to lead, as a reluctant "general," the refugees who make up his slapdash army. During Dann's period of incapacity, the task of running the army devolves to a sidekick named Griot; like many messianic figures, Dann requires a loyal administrator to smooth over the public perception of his bipolar outbursts.

Although "The Story of General Dann" will make little sense if you haven't read the earlier book, as a sequel it is both satisfying (tying up loose ends and expanding on earlier themes) and frustrating (leaving just as many loose ends). The book's pacing is admittedly slower and the plot is slighter: this is more a character study than an adventure story. Significant portions of the book deal with Dann's psychological breakdowns, with Griot's hunger for Dann's approval, and with their obsession with finding out as much as they can about the mysteries of the past. This sequel seems, in fact, to be a bridge to a yet-to-be-published finale.

Yet Lessing still conveys her preoccupations with the frailty of knowledge and our continual need to recreate the discoveries of the past: "it's likes seeing the worlds of ghosts.... We are looking at words that were copied from others, written by people who lived long before them." In an interview with John Freeman, Lessing spoke about this theme: "What pains me is that everything the human race has created has happened in the last 10,000 years, you know, and most of it in the recent years. An ice age would just wipe that out. It would. Then we have to begin again then, don't we, which is what we always do." The Mara and Dann books, then, are not simply disturbing fantasies disguised as adventures stories, but parables on the tenuousness and persistence of human civilization.

I want the time I spent reading this back.
General Dann doesn't understand the point of rebuilding because what they achieve will be lost and someone will have to rebuild again someday. Griot wishes Dann would act. The people still love Dann anyway. The book ends.

This was the type of book that I finished because I was hoping the ending would be worth it somehow. It wasn't, and I wanted to throw the book across the room when I had finished. The best that can be said is that it embodies Dann's sense of futility in engaging in any action. And boy, does that NOT make for good reading.