Recent books on tape
Rachel Redford
MARA AND DANN by Doris Lessing £21.99, 19hrs 55 mins, unabridged THE place is Ilfric, and the time is the future, but with Africa currently so poignantly in the news, Mara and Dann remains topical. After a coup, Mara and her little brother Dann have lost their palace home, and have walked many miles in search of water and shelter. They are taken in by an old woman and over the years they scratch a bare subsistence on a land fought over by spiders the size of dogs, huge scorpions, men made cruel by hunger and thirst — and the encroaching desert. Doris Lessing's creation of the war- ring societies, and the desperation of famine with cows sucking their own teats, is a powerful one.
The narration, however, does no service to the author. When we read, an internal voice is heard without being expressed, but just as a film substitutes real for imagined faces, so an audiobook provides a real voice, and the voice here is an unhappy choice. Ilfric is clearly Africa, so why do Mara and Dann have voices straight out of an English preparatory school? Was it thought that a black reader would limit the universality of the novel's theme? Further- more, Jilly Bond's narration, teasing out the intonation as though she is reading a bedtime story, and her imitation of very young children's voices in the dialogue in the early parts of the story, grate. Even when Mara becomes the adult narrator of the story, the voice Jilly Bond gives her retains a little-girly quality which becomes increasingly irritating. The novel's serious core, which forces the listener to examine the disastrous results of our squandering of precious resources, is diminished.
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