Notes on "The Rainbow" by D. H. Lawrence

I have been listening to The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence, but I am giving up on it about half way through. I have become impatient with Lawrence's narrative style. Many novels are written from an omniscient perspective. Lawrence writes from a perspective of universal sympathy. He understands, and describes in detail, the inner emotional turmoil of his characters. Pages and pages pass without dialog, direct interaction among characters, or event. The microscopic examination of psyche feels unauthentic to me. It made me feel more remote from the characters, like they are chess pieces being moved on a chess board. Such intimate sympathy does not make me feel more involved in the internal lives as Lawrence may have intended. It makes me feel they are slaves to the author's will and whim.

That being said, The Rainbow has not been without rewards. The prose, particularly when describing the external world, can border on the poetic. The book recounts three generations of the Brangwin family, owners of a small farm near Nottingham. Here is a passage near the start describing the life of on the Brangwin Farm:

But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will.

Hearing this, I thought I was in for a story bound to the English countryside, with rich and detailed descriptions of farm life, but the author seems to lose interest. We hear comparatively little of the work the do, or the practicalities of life.

The Librivox book is beautifully read by a single reader, Debra Lynn, who has a slightly incongruous, but level and pleasant midwestern accent. She kept me listening long after I would have otherwise stopped.

- J