SOURCE: Clark, Alex. “Basic Human Instincts.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4940 (2 April 1999): 21-5.

In the following review, Clark faults Lessing's characterization and prose style in Mara and Dann.

When Doris Lessing subtitles a book An adventure, you know that the stories that follow will not fit neatly into an existing picaresque tradition, in spite of the author's note and its proclaimed intention to reprise “the oldest story in Europe”—which ends with the words “and they lived happily ever after”. It is far more likely that the adventure will be something of an endurance test for its characters, a backdrop against which Lessing can, with characteristic expansiveness, explore further her abiding interests in the nature of personal freedom, social responsibility, destiny and the relentless march of history into the terrifying abyss of the future.

So it is with Mara and Dann, which takes us thousands of years into that...