Mara and Dann

One day last autumn my son Peter Lessing came in to say that he had just been listening, on the radio, to a tale about an orphaned brother and sister who had all kinds of adventures, suffered a hundred vicissitudes, and ended up living happily ever after. This was the oldest story in Europe. "Why don't you write something like that?" he suggested. "Oddly enough," I replied, "that is exactly what I am writing and I have nearly finished it."

This kind of thing happens in families, but perhaps not so often in laboratories.

Mara and Dann is a reworking of a very old tale, and it is found not only in Europe but in most cultures in the world.

It is set in the future, in Africa, called Ifrik because of how often we may hear how the short a becomes a short i.

An Ice Age covers all the northern hemisphere.

I cannot be the only person who, hearing that the most common condition for the northern parts of the world is to be under — sometimes — miles of ice, shivers, not because of imagined cold winds, since every one of us is equipped with that potent talisman for survival, It can't happen to me, making it impossible for us to weaken ourselves by brooding on possible calamities, but from the thought that one day, thousands of years in the future, our descendants might be saying, "In the 12,000-year interval between one thrust of the Ice Age and the next, there flourished a whole story of human development, from savagery and barbarism to high culture" — and all our civilisations and languages, and cities and skills and inventions, our farms and gardens and forests, and the birds and the beasts we try so hard to protect against our depredations, will amount to a sentence or a paragraph in a long history. But perhaps it will be a 15,000-year interregnum, or less or more, for our experts say that the next Ice Age, already overdue, may begin in a year's time or in a thousand years.

Mara and Dann is an attempt to imagine what some of the consequences might be when the ice returns and life must retreat to the middle and southern latitudes. Our past experiences help to picture the future. During the hardest of previous periods of ice, the Mediterranean was dry. During warmer intervals, when the ice withdrew for a while, the Neanderthals returned from exile in the south to take up life again in their still chilly valleys. If they did not see their sojourns south as exile, why did they always return?

Perhaps it is the Neanderthals who will turn out to have been our truest ancestors, having bequeathed to us our amazing diversity, our ability to live in any clime or condition and, above all, our endurance. I like to imagine them, with their great experience of ice, posting a watch for the advancing white mountains.

April 1998

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