Customer Reviews

The Rainbow (Wordsworth Classics)

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Lawrence is not fashionable at present, perhaps because he is just too good, and too gifted. Hardly any other English writer, perhaps only Thomas Hardy, comes near him in his ability to show the reality of people's whole lives, to present their emotions, and to depict the experience of living and working in 20th-century Britain. This is a unique and marvellous book, but we should also read his 'Sons and lovers' and 'Women in love'.

Lawrence's fame (or notoriety) rests on his sexual frankness, but what a lot of readers overlook is how well he wrote about parent-child relationships and family dynamics. The beginning of this novel is absolutely brilliant: Tom Brangwen and the Polish widow marry in haste, then find that they still haven't worked out their relationship. Her young daughter is an uneasy third party, and the child's sensitivity to the unease in their household is beautifully described, as well as her stepfather's gentle efforts to befriend her. As Lawrence continues the family history, his usual obsessions surface. But in general, it's a good story: sex is an organic part of his characters' lives rather than the mainspring of the whole plot (as in some of his other novels). And the characters come across as multi-dimensional human beings rather than talking heads (or other organs) for Lawrence's comments on life. A good novel for people who "don't like D.H. Lawrence."

More passionate that Women in Love, much deeper than Lady Chatterley, I think this is Lawrence's most successful novel. While ostensibly chronicling the moves from an agricultural to industrialised society, he plumbs the emotional depths of his characters. Frequently viewed as old-fashioned, Lawrence captures all the quivering, trembling, tentative life inside his characters and somehow paints it on the page. I first read this when I was seventeen just before going to university to read English and it left me blown away. I've since avaoided re-reading in case I'm disappointed, but have finally succumbed - and no, I'm not! Not a tube read as you need to concentrate and allow yourself to be sucked into its emotional depths but it's well worth it.

ps. What a very odd cover Penguin have chosen for the re-release?

The Rainbow is a hugely rewarding novel, which despite its relative brevity has the air of the epic about it. I had previously read Lady Chatterley's Lover and I've since read Women in Love, but while I enjoyed both neither had the impact of The Rainbow. That this book was censured and unavailable to buy legally in Britain for over a decade is testimony that many aspects of British life in the earlier decades of the last century are not worth mourning. The Brangwens are a family to be savoured, and Lawrence expertly evokes a long lost semi-mythical past without resorting to sentiment. This is a magnificent novel, and in over thirty years of devouring books of many kinds, this is one that has few peers.

This classic DH Lawrence story is full of his usual passion and beautiful descriptive passages about the surroundings and the characters, however this particular version - although admittedly cheap - is chock full of typo's. The letter "U" seems to be universally replaced with "n", and there are some amusing spellings which do alter the context at times such as "buffer" instead of "butter"! But on the whole it doesn't spoil the storyline - except for making me chuckle during a scene of anguish! I'm not sure what Lawrence would have thought about this version!

This is, like `Women in Love' and `Sons and Lovers', a masterpiece.

It was originally intended to be all one story with `Women in Love', but by the time Lawrence got to writing `Women in Love' his powers and confidence as an artist had grown. The Ursula character was to have carried the Laurentian message forward into the second story with extra force, because we would have a full understanding of the development of her mind to the point where she meets Birkin. However we find in `Women in Love' that the voice of Lawrence is with Birkin and Ursula is a slightly diminished character, who often finds herself challenging him.

The result of this is to mean you can read to the two novels separately and be satisfied with both as single pieces of great fiction.

Reading, studying and then having the joy of sharing the work of Lawrence with young people, when I taught him at `A' Level has been one of the high points of my life.

In my own novel `A Song for Jo' Lawrence has an influence on the intellectual and emotional development of the two main characters, Jo and Chris, who are college students studying English. Other great literature from Keats, Emily Bronte and Shakespeare (and more) is worked into the narrative. It is a love story with a difference!

People of all ages and sex have enjoyed it.

It's available on Amazon - please follow the link.

A Song for Jo

The Rainbow was my favourite novel whilst studying for A level English Lit, and this hard back copy is superb, beautifully finished and covered, an ideal gift.

'There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown, about which they were eager' - a prescience.

I studied this novel as a teenager and was very struck by it then. 22 years on, it has hit me the same way. Gender difference is everywhere ['The women were different...[they] looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond'] as is a brooding, overhanging sexuality which comes over as something unavoidable: a destiny which undermines the false, formal gloss. Women in the novel are defined by `something elsewhere'. Nature whirls around Tom like a storm of his own making in oblivion. Not so for Lydia; when she hears the beck it troubles her; she shrinks from the presence of the gorse bushes.

In Anna, the more she fulfils her consciousness the further from her ideal the world around falls: 'always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard'. It is the same for Ursula. The novel is brilliantly rich in the imagery of fire and regeneration: the phoenix, a the taste of ash of cold fear, fine flames running under the skin, women whose eyes are dark and flowing with fire. Lawrence also litters his text with brilliant juxtapositions of nouns and adjectives but they are never forced, never `clever'. The storyline follows three generations of the Brangwen family from around 1840 into the early years of the twentieth century. Stability is shattered by the invasion of the rural landscape by The Cut, a new route for the Nottingham Canal after the embankment collapse in the 1820s.

The conflict between man and woman forms another central theme: Anna's relationship with Will is stormy; living together is almost an impossibility. Architecture and the image of the rainbow litter the text in parallel with one another. Will attempts an affair with a warehouse-lass with `pellucid eyes, like shallow water'. His wife, noticing a change, responds - `Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in the darkness and death of their own sensual activities', a sensuality as violent and extreme as death. The change also transforms Will's outward life as he becomes more concerned with issues of education - an interest which he will later try to deny Ursula.

If there is a fulcrum, it is Chapter IX in which Tom is drowned at Marsh Farm, destroyed by the unleashed forces which industrialised society has tried to pin back. Leaving the pub in Nottingham, Tom jests - `Which of us is Noah?' The vocabulary echoes the evening on which Tom proposed to Lensky - `there was a curious roar in the night, which seemed to be made in the darkness of his own intoxication'. His death at this point is his destiny; Lawrence goes to great pain to italicise - `He had to go and look'. `The whole black night was swooping in rings...In his soul, he knew he would fall.' His wife senses his moment of death and, even after the recovery of the body, there is an unnatural strangeness in the behaviour of the women. Lydia and Anna's lines are like a funeral in themselves.

Ursula is about 8 and it clearly shapes her perceptions. She tries, but fails, to reconcile the `Sunday world' with the `weekday world' which governs the practicalities of life. The year as interpreted by Man becomes a cycle culminating in resurrection to death, not life. But, for once, Lawrence loses himself in his discourse - Ursula's thoughts cease to be hers. The result is one of the strongest passages in the whole book: "But why? Why shall I not rise with my body whole and perfect, shining with strong life?"

Ursula's personal life develops with Skrebensky, and her teacher, Miss Inger. But after matriculating in 1900, Ursula decides to become a teacher - a job for which Lawrence himself initially trained, whilst the Boer War has already called Skrebensky. She plans to take a post in Kingston but, under the influence of her parents, accepts a post in a grim school in a local town, where her ideals about teaching are soon shattered. As the Brangwens move from Cossethay to Beldover, one of the most powerful objections to the conformity of industrial society echoes down the decades to our own age. "The streets were like visions of pure ugliness: a grey-black, macadamised road, asphalt causeways, held in between a flat succession of wall, window and door, a new brick channel that began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly".

The mythic qualities of the novel intensify with the more openly pagan symbolism of oak trees, prehistoric earthworks and horses. On the Sussex Downs Skrebensky wonders what he is doing with a woman for whom houses and beds have become distasteful things. For Ursula the idea of marrying would drag the darkness of their passion into a sordid, formal reality. The final scenes have a landscape akin to a Tarkovsky dreamscape, littered with the symbolism of Genesis.

There is a `dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land' from which we have to break free. Industrial society - people groping in the bowels of the earth, new housing, academic lectures at college or the cycle of mechanistic learning and thrashings that Brinsley Street doles out - is all meaningless distraction, a snake of monotonous logic swallowing its own tail. Ursula's vision must `quiver to life' in the spirit. It is an optimistic scenario predicated on Lawrence's belief that World War I was about to end but no vision of democracy: Ursula tells Skrebensky that she would prefer an aristocracy of birth rather one of money and Lawrence called democracy an `equality of dirt'. The Somme was still to come so it is hardly surprising that Women In Love, which started life as the same book, is so much more focused on undercurrents of violence.

"Why shall I not rise with my body whole and perfect, shining with strong life?"

This read more like Hardy than Lawrence; I felt that the Author wanted to express and say a lot more than he did. All this talk about Fecundity just hides the deeper emotion and turmoil that the characters are experiencing; I could feel the players bursting with hidden feeling, yet Lawrence didn't want to expose them, unlike Lady Chatterley. Not a bad read, but restrained.