This is a book about the relationships between two sisters and their, how shall we say, lovers.

It's written so that each chapter has dominant symbol (a rabbit, a scared horse, a wrestiling match), and I thought the symbols he chose were compelling (picture a man forcing a terrified horse to stand in place, only feet away from the first train it's ever seen as the train roars by). I especially liked the end, where they all go on a a vacation retreat in some remote and snowy mountains in northern Germany. There's a lot of psychologizing about love and despair, which got a little tiring at times for me.

Nothing more wearisome than reviewing an already over-reviewed book. [It’s a different sort of BURIAL, eh?] The century, or just my past decade, has not been favorable to Lawrence. Where he ties himself in knots seems to me not worth the effort to unravel; the parallel movements of literature and philosophy have done much to expose these as symptomatic crotchets of self-obsession. So much of the overwrought atmospherics are little more than histrionic idiosyncrasies, and the “Lawrentian” ideological universe blunts even sharp insights with bombastic language and notions. It is certainly not entirely awful—Lawrence deserves to be read, parsing merit from the meretricious—but the method of embellishing the obscure with more murky obscurity is hardly to my lasting taste. If the more maudlin side of Dostoyevsky wrote with his wang, that’d be Lawrence, a narcissistic Nietzschean epigone prowling for a soulmate. Someone is perpetually swooning or bursting. It’s a slipshod psychological framework of melodrama suffused with a “dark, dark, ever forever unfathomably dark” chthonic libido, a thwarted and duped cosmophilia, a metaphysically bleak vitalist romance rendered in existentialist pointillism, a pessimist’s soap opera via hallucination. Still, there is perceptive and lucid lightning amid this cloying fug of benighted introspective-cum-interpersonal wanderlust. Here is an example in which acuity and obscurity are superimposed:

“There were depths of passion when one became impersonal and indifferent, unemotional. Whereas Ursula was still at the emotional personal level—always so abominably personal. He had taken her as he had never been taken himself. He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame—like a demon, laughing over the fountain of mystic corruption which was one of the sources of her being, laughing, shrugging, accepting, accepting finally. As for her, when would she so much go beyond herself as to accept him at the quick of death?”

Enough. Despite the gems in the rough, despite the quotable quips mired in a nauseating Weltanschauung, an unbearable stylistic tic was the endless redundancy, as if while writing Lawrence would hit on a word or phrase and exclaim “Hmph, yes, that’s the ticket!” and write it again. And sometimes again. “I have something to say. Indeed, I am saying this something, this something that must be said.” Don’t take my word for it:

“Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, made her want to die, to die. The beauty of his dim and luminous loins as he climbed over the boat…” and so on and so on just die already or kill me.

For kindred readers, you will understand when I say that Lawrence’s avatar Rupert Birkin reminds me of no one so much as Otto from The Recognitions.

It is Lawrence's most complete statement. He argues with himself all through it: struggling to find a way to define what he wants to know about the individual and others. The characters are intense, fierce, intelligent, combative. They clash; they pound into each other. Lawrence explores ideas through the fist-tight dialogue and the bold imagery. And he quests for answers in his insistent narrative too. Ursula remains the real centre of the book, but Birkin, Gudrun and Gerald all get close-up focus too. I remembered from the film that one of the male characters died at the end. Funny, I was relieved to find that it was Gerald. Birkin is more congenial to me. Sadly, Ursula has no more sapphic adventures, but Gerald and Birkin represent an awkward attempt at male companionship that never quite happens. Lawrence is never less than interesting, and he has a great talent for rendering action with vivid immediacy. This is a book that is worth arguing with.