- Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (26 Oct 1989)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140181962
- ISBN-13: 978-0140181968
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,841,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III It is remarkable how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England. We hear continual complaints of the stodgy dullness of the English. It would be quite as just to complain of their freakish, unusual characters. Only en masse the metal is all Britannia. In an ugly little mining town we find the odd ones just as distinct as anywhere else. Only it happens that dull people invariably meet dull people, and odd individuals always come across odd individuals, no matter where they may be. So that to each kind society seems all of a piece. At one end of the dark tree-covered Shottle Lane stood the "Royal Oak" public house; and Mrs. Houseley was certainly an odd woman. At the other end of the lane was Shottle House, where the Bricknells lived; the Bricknells were odd, also. Alfred Bricknell, the old man, was one of the partners in the Colliery firm. His English was incorrect, his accent, broad Derbyshire, and he was not a gentleman in the snobbish sense of the word. Yet he was well-to-do, and very stuck-up. His wife was dead. Shottle House stood two hundred yards beyond New Brunswick Colliery. The colliery was imbedded in a plantation, whence its burning pit-hill glowed, fumed, and stank sulphur in the nostrils of the Bricknells. Even war-time efforts had not put out this refuse fire. Apart from this, Shottle House was a pleasant square house, rather old, with shrubberies and lawns. It ended the lane in a dead end. Only a field-path trekked away to the left. On this particular Christmas Eve Alfred Bricknell had only two of his children at home. Of the others, one daughter was unhappily married, and away in India weeping herself thinner;another was nursing her babies in Streatham. Jim, the hope of the house, and Julia, now married to Robert Cunningham, ha...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
Written in the years following the First World War, Aaron's Rod questions many of the accepted social and political institutions of Lawrence's generation. The Cambridge Edition of the novel, based on the only authoritative surviving typescript, restores these cut passages and eliminates the errors and house-styling of previous editions.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
First Sentence
There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Most of the critical acclaim of Lawrence's writing centres on his early novels such as Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, thus somewhat debasing his latter works. Aaron's Rod is such a work. Based during the period after the First World War it centres on Aaron Sisson. Feeling distracted and stuck in a society which is unable to adapt to the devastation of the war Aaron leaves his wife and children on Christmas Eve to begin a new life. He journeys from his home town to the continent via London paying his way by means of his acclaimed flute playing.
On his travels Aaron meets a variety of people who provide him with insights into what is possible in society. Though these meetings and friendships Aaron undertakes a period of introspection which leads him to believe that the society he has left behind is destined to be further undermined by its degenerative nature. Finally, in Italy, Aaron is brought face to face with the truth about post war Europe. The Fascists and Socialists are at odds with one another. The Fascists rise to power has angered the Socialists and there are a number of incidents which are brought to life by Lawrence's own experiences and his sense of place. Lawrence uses one of these incidents for the climax of the novel. Aaron is our drinking with his new friends when a bomb explodes in the cafe. This bomb breaks Aaron's flute and he feels as if there is nothing left for him as his flute is his life. The final chapter is a mind blowing foray into the psychology and philosophy of the time. Lawrence inter-twines a fantastic array of psychologicl analysis and fiction to leave us questioning our own lives and the way we lead them. As anyone who reads this book will understand it is not that the ending of an object is the ending of life but the opportunity to begin anew, as Aaron himself finds out in the opening pages of the book.
Lawrence's works are of outstanding quality throughout. This book has been criticised by many for having a disjointed narrative and a broken story line. It is precisely these charcteristics that make this novel a joy to read. The way in which Lawrence manipulates his characters and situations is magnificent and his ability to close a story is without question one of the best of British writers in the early twentieth century. It is without doubt that Lawrence is a complex writer and this shows throught his work, but the latter novels, with the exception of Lady Chatterley's Lover, are without question the finest he wrote. If you read any Lawrence book in the near future read this one; it has been a truely under-rated work of art.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
An odyssey of passion, individuality and art
14 May 2001
Format:Paperback
Aaron Sisson, a coal miner and amateur flutist in the Midlands, abandons his wife and two children and escapes to Italy in the hope of throwing off the trammels of his environment and realising his individual potentials. His dream is to become recognised as a master flutist. In Florence, he mixes in intellectual and artistic circles and has an affair with an aristocratic lady who redeems him in his own eyes. Like the majority of Lawrence's novels, the central theme is the relations between men and women, though this time, it is given a twist owing to Lawrence nourishing his mind on a reading of Nietzsche, who was then gradually becoming recognised in England. In his analysis of the concept of "love" between the sexes, Lawrence perceives it as a function of the will to power, a cycle of reciprocal domination and surrender, in which the man must conquer and the woman must submit. Elements of the rejection of the "herd morality" on Aaron's part and his endeavour at self-development are both ideas of peculiarly Nietzschean provenance. The fact that Aaron realises himself through music is another echo of Nietzsche, who regarded music as the purest and most supreme of the arts, in which the passions achieve immense gratification. The title refers to the rod of Aaron in the Old Testament, one of Moses's renegade priests who built the golden calf in the desert for the worship of the Israelites. The rod, his symbol of authority and independence, finds its echo in Aaron's flute, which is broken later in the novel during an anarchist riot. There is a price to pay, Lawrence seems to imply, for daring to oppose orthodoxy and to try to create a new life for oneself. Unlike Lawrence's more famous works, such as "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and "Women in Love", which are both admirable for their rich, poetic prose, "Aaron's Rod" is drably written and occasionally tedious, with a narrative that is sometimes poorly connected, as it dwells on irrelevancies. However, the message, that of an individual fulfilling his duty to himself, is an encouraging and refreshing one.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Blue Ball'd
28 May 2004
Format:Paperback
Strangely, this was my first full-length D.H. Lawrence novel. Thankfully, I'd read enough of his short stories and essays to know that Aaron's Rod isn't indicative of his artistic capabilities. I was more impressed by the concept behind the novel than its execution. Essentially, Aaron Sisson's abandonment of his family and job in order to join a travelling orchestra is meant to symbolize the power and passion of "individual freedom," "personal friendship", "masculinity" and "art". I think he only half-succeeds. Just as Aaron comes across as an "incomplete" man searching for meaning in post World War I Europe, I think the novel is too loosely constructed, and Lawrence's characters, too thinly drawn. But on a symbolic level, they are full of Lawrentian psychology. The characters of Rawden Lilly, Struthers, the Bricknells, and others all overtly represent various aspects of male and female polarities; however, they are un-memorable and sometimes difficult to relate to.
I was hoping this would be more of an "artist's novel" containing interesting descriptions of Aaron's life in Florence with his bohemian friends, and to a certain extent it is, but Lawrence seemed more interested in symbolism than in telling a good story. Though scattered as a story, the concepts of individuality and society are clearly portrayed throughout "Aaron's Rod", and towards the end, when the anarchist's bomb goes off, we sense a "breaking" (the blue ball/ornament at the beginning, and the flute/rod at the end) of an outdated mode of thinking (i.e. patriarchy, male dominance, etc.) in favor not necessarily of feminity, but an integration of the two. This particular Penguin edition has an excellent introduction and helpful end-notes by Steven Vine which help explain Lawrence and his symbolism to those unfamiliar with his works. I might re-read this novel once I've read more of Lawrence, and come back to it one day from a different viewpoint, but for now, I'd have to say that unless you're a real Lawrence afficionado, I'd hold off on this one until you figure out whether or not you like Lawrence enough to proceed to something as scattered, cold, and dry as this novel comes across.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
For aficionados only
29 Jan 2001
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you've not read any Lawrence this is not the book to start with. It fails as a novel because there is no story to speak of, just a string of scenes to initiate discussion of the issues Lawrence wished to explore. Apologists describe it as picaresque, but there is far more unity to most novels that deserve that descriptor. Nonetheless, there are wonderful scenes that fitfully jar this book to life, Lawrence's admirable command of language, and a brooding homoeroticism aching to burst out. Try this book after you've hit the major works (i.e. Women in Love, etc.).
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Classics
- Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction
- Books > Fiction > Literary Fiction
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
