Winter in July

This is a collection of seven short stories all set in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) where Doris Lessing spent most of the first 30 years of her life. They were originally published in 1964 while she was writing her Children of Violence novels also set in Southern Africa and so her writing mind was steeped in her memories of her early life in a fiercely colonial country. They are bleak in a way that only a certain displacement; at times verging on hostility can make people feel who are caught in the wrong time and in the wrong place. That wrong time and wrong place was Southern Rhodesia where an increasingly nationalistic white minority government was holding sway over a cowed and silent black majority.

All the stories are set in the show more Veld; the wide open rural landscapes of Southern Africa and they feature white settlers living in small isolated communities struggling to tame an environment that can be unforgiving. Mostly they take the point of view of the females, wives, girlfriends, lovers who feel the isolation much more keenly than their male counterparts. The men can get on with running the huge farms, while the women are left to their own devices, managing their children and the native servants; divorced from much of society and increasingly divorced from their men who live in their man’s world on the farm. The sights sounds smells of a wild and largely untamed countryside seep through the stories providing a backdrop that shapes the lives of Lessing’s protagonists. The rural native black population who provide the manpower that supports the lives of the white settlers has been wrenched out of their village life to reside in Kraals or compounds and are misunderstood at best and castigated and punished at worst by their white masters.

Nobody wins in these stories. The white farmers who take a more sympathetic line with their black labourers are undone by their failure to understand the way the natives see their world and by an unsympathetic government who frown on any leniency. The Afrikaners (white Dutch Settlers) who in these stories are the ‘poor whites’ and are particularly abusive and violent, suffer as a result. The women who try and make a life for themselves on the farms are open to petty jealousies or hostilities from their peers while facing a conflict with their black servants and incomprehension of their issues from their male partners.

Lessing’s view of her past life is accurately recorded in these stories, it is a jaundiced view of the white community, but one that is imbued by the love of rural Southern Africa. They are vivid well written stories that never fail to portray a world that remained hidden from most of her contemporary readers and because of the milieu that Lessing has chosen for all the stories they work together in painting a picture of a society doomed to fail. They are available in two volumes of her collected African Short stories, but if you want to dip into a selection this collection is as good as any. 4 Stars. show less