I once went to a wedding where the bride and groom’s first dance at the reception was to the Elton John song Sacrifice. Strange choice I thought. ‘Into the boundary of each married man sweet deceit comes calling and negativity lands’. An interesting lyric, however, suggesting that marriage creates a new boundary as a condition of not being alone anymore. Two work colleagues have boundaries that do not exist for a married couple. And a married couple have boundaries that do not exist for two work mates going out for the evening. This sort of irony runs throughout Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing.

Here’s another song for you – Lennon and McCartney’s With a Little Help From My Friends, where someone keeps wanting to fall in love, but actually gets by with help from their friends. In The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner grew up on a farm in South Africa, but moves to the city and spends a contented few years doing office work, and getting along quite happily with her wide friendship group. Then she overhears some gossiping women remarking on the fact that she is unmarried and not as young as she used to be. Mary reacts by rushing into marriage with a farmer she meets at a cinema, moving out of the city to his remote farm.

Mary’s story goes from A Little Help From My Friends to Sacrifice. No more casual lunch meet ups for her. Out on the wide open spaces of the veld, Mary lives behind a new boundary. And as in Sacrifice, sweet deceit comes calling. It all ends in her murder. This is not a spoiler. We know from the beginning that Mary gets murdered and we know who did it. The question is what happened to get there?

We get there really through the contradictions of human relationships. Mary can only be accepted into white rural society by subscribing to the notion of white superiority. But Mary can only be accepted into humanity in general by accepting that the notions of her white rural society are vile nonsense. She can choose a sort of deluded friendship with her fellow white farmers, or a universal fellowship, specifically with her native servant. But the more that fellowship calls her, the more isolated she is from her own society, and the more harshly she behaves trying to live by its delusions of superiority. There is always a boundary it seems.

Reading a book is a kind of relationship. In some ways it can be a less real and intense alternative to reality, a pleasant meet-up for lunch. In other ways it can offer something more dramatic than reality. Both options are on offer here.

Generosity: An Enhancement is a story about a troubled former writer, Russell Stone, who, after some moderate early success, has suffered a crisis of confidence. He ends up editing magazine copy, and teaching creative writing on a short-term contract at a college in Chicago. One of his students, an Algerian refugee called Thassafit Amzwar, comes to fascinate him. Her level of happiness and contentment is so marked that it might rise into a category known to psychiatry as hyperthymia. After news of this happy girl gets around, a genetic research team becomes interested in her, believing she might possess a ‘gene for happiness’. Generosity was published in 2009, a quick internet search revealing that this was a year seeing significant advances in the science of genetics. The book reflects a time when understanding of the human genome was increasing to the point where it might soon be possible to choose the characteristics of a baby.

The author Richard Powers hovers behind his book, occasionally making enigmatic appearances to comment on the characters he has created. This might come over as a fancy, postmodern-literature trick if it didn’t fit so well with the issues the book considers. There’s a feeling in Generosity that people might not have to accept for much longer the whims that fate deals out. Richard Powers presents a scenario where people have lived, in effect, as characters in a novel, at the mercy of their author. They have had no choice about the looks, intelligence or inherited diseases they are born with. That time might soon be over. Characters have the potential to become their own authors, controlling their own destinies. But before they get above themselves, those same characters also have to accept that control is contradictory. Think about it this way. Advances in genetics might seem to offer the prospect of humanity deciding their fate, but those advances actually give power over the vast majority to a tiny group of scientists who are the only ones who actually understand the science. Are they up to such a responsibility? Or are they in the situation of a writer like diffident Russell Stone, who finds the writing he is supposed to control taking on an unpredictable life of its own?

This is a book of big ideas from someone who clearly knows lots about literature and science. But for all that, I did not feel Generosity was a vehicle designed to show off its author’s cleverness and knowledge. I mean it is clever, and there is a great deal of wide-ranging knowledge. But there is something else, a feeling that while authors might appear to be up there in author heaven, deciding destinies, they are in fact – if they are any good – also down here with everyone else, from Nobel-winning scientists, to people who have no idea about the science, and have to look it up on Wikipedia, and even then are not much the wiser.

The result is a book that reads like a kind of low-key, brainy thriller, not with good guys and bad guys, but with guys whose good intentions end up making them into ambiguous guys. I would recommend.