SOURCE: Knapp, Mona. Review of Mara and Dann, by Doris Lessing. World Literature Today 74, no. 2 (spring 2000): 366.

In the following review, Knapp focuses on the heroine's role in the narrative development of Mara and Dann.

As if to insist on a perspective that makes the year 2000 appear trivial, Doris Lessing's last novel of the twentieth century [Mara and Dann] looks forward by several thousand years and is set in the next ice age. The civilization of Western Europe (known here as “Yerrup”) has long since been obliterated by glaciers, and the Mediterranean Sea is empty. Human life, pushed southward on the continent now known as Ifrik (Africa), has been reduced to a few primitive tribes who are warring for control of the habitable regions, while also struggling for survival against drought and plagues.

Lessing's futuristic Odyssey opens with the kidnapping of two children from their village, during which four-year-old...