The Rainbow

This had begun in heterodox meditations on Christianity, and had then swerved towards mysticism, Buddhism and — most arousing of all — earthy, pagan theologies.

The 100 best novels: No 43 - The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

Seductively, for English adolescents in, say, , Lawrence seemed to celebrate the liberation of the individual in the mass, through the celebration of primal instincts. The DH Lawence with whom we fell in love with was a protean figure, for sure. The barest sketch of his biography — the humble origins in mining Nottinghamshire; the escape to metropolitan London; his elopement with Frieda, a married woman; the long exile; his "savage pilgrimage" to self-knowledge; and finally his early death from tuberculosis in , aged just 44 — put him effortlessly in the company of the great Romantics, Byron and Keats.

But he was more than a Romantic, apparently in a deep colloquy with some darker forces.

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He was also intimately in touch with nature, which plays a vital role in all Lawrence's best work. Thomas Hardy had written about rural Dorset with a poet's eye, but Hardy was a Victorian who treated the landscape as an attractive backdrop to the human drama.

Lawrence is a 20th-century writer and his vision is fresh, dynamic and modern — as if nature is there to galvanise the human soul, not merely to decorate his or her environment. Listen to Lawrence describe the scene beyond the grime of the colliery in Women in Love: It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms… currant bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over stone walls.

And then, beyond the confines of The Great Tradition , there was that notorious novel with those forbidden words, and those ectstatic descriptions of sexual intercourse. Lady Chatterley was an essential handbook to the 60s. Lawrence's fascination with sex made a wonderful contrast with the terribly grey dullness of the postwar world.

Similarly, in The Rainbow and Women in Love , the sexuality of his characters throbs through the narrative like a feverish pulse. No one writes better than Lawrence about the complexity of desire, especially homosexual desire. Looking back, Lady Chatterley's Lover was both the making of DH Lawrence in the postwar English imagination, and ultimately, the ruining of his reputation.

Most damaging of all — from one book that's a long way below his best — DH Lawrence became fatally attached to the zeitgeist, and fatally identified with just one novel. In time, inevitably, there was a reaction against the bells and the beards, the drugs, the pan pipes and the liberation. So Lawrence got thrown out with the flared trousers, the Beatles and, in America, with the Vietnam war. By the dawn of the 80s there was no place for clowns, and four-letter words were two a penny.

And so, from the occasionally ridiculous to the sublime. Lawrence first attracted the attention of literary London with a short story entitled Odour of Chrysanthemums, and it's as the master of the short story that I began to read him. This places it after his acclaimed third novel, Sons and Lovers , but before The Rainbow , the novel that secures his claim on posterity. The Rainbow , for me, is as close to perfection as any of his mature fiction. The novel opens with Marsh Farm, the home of the Brangwen family whose men and women, Lawrentian archetypes, inhabit the landscape that Lawrence loved.

One of the many joys of The Rainbow is his evocation of the natural world, physical, timeless and symbolic.

The Rainbow

Once Tom Brangwen has married his "Polish lady" chapter 1 and adopts her daughter Anna as his own, the narrative kicks into a high gear, the close-knit exploration of feelings. Anna meets Tom's nephew, Will. They marry; she becomes pregnant with Ursula; and the novel slowly builds to its celebrated concluding section: Ursula's quest for fulfilment in a heartless, repressive society.

After her doomed passion for Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry, Ursula is left with a more personal epiphany, one doubtless shared by its author, a vision of a rainbow: The more we look at DH Lawrence, the harder it is to understand why — apart from a shift in the cultural mood — he should have become so neglected.

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Certainly, he held some perverse, and often baffling, views on sexual politics, especially feminism; also on democracy and organised labour; and on modernity. The book spans a period of roughly 65 years from the s to , and shows how the love relationships of the Brangwens change against the backdrop of the increasing industrialisation of Britain.

The best novels: No 43 - The Rainbow by DH Lawrence () | Books | The Guardian

The first central character, Tom Brangwen, is a farmer whose experience of the world does not stretch beyond these two counties; while the last, Ursula, his granddaughter, studies at university and becomes a teacher in the progressively urbanised, capitalist and industrial world. The book starts with a description of the Brangwen dynasty, then deals with how Tom Brangwen, one of several brothers, fell in love with a Polish refugee and widow, Lydia.

The next part of the book deals with Lydia's daughter by her first husband, Anna, and her destructive, battle-riven relationship with her husband, Will, the son of one of Tom's brothers. The last and most extended part of the book, and also probably the most famous, then deals with Will and Anna's daughter, Ursula, and her struggle to find fulfilment for her passionate, spiritual and sensual nature against the confines of the increasingly materialist and conformist society around her.

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She experiences a same-sex relationship with a teacher, and a passionate but ultimately doomed love affair with Anton Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry. At the end of the book, having failed to find her fulfilment in Skrebensky, she has a vision of a rainbow towering over the Earth, promising a new dawn for humanity:.

The Rainbow was followed by a sequel in , Women in Love. Although Lawrence conceived of the two novels as one, considering the titles The Sisters and The Wedding Ring for the work, they were published as two separate novels at the urging of his publisher. However, after the negative public reception of The Rainbow , Lawrence's publisher opted out of publishing the sequel.

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Ursula's spiritual and emotional quest continues in Women in Love , in which she continues to be a main character. This second work follows her into a relationship with Rupert Birkin often seen as a self-portrait by Lawrence , and follows her sister Gudrun's parallel relationship with Birkin's friend, Gerald Crich. The philosopher Roger Scruton , writing in Sexual Desire , argues that "because we live in a world structured by gender, the other sex is forever to some extent a mystery to us, with a dimension of experience that we can imagine but never inwardly know.

The following year, the novel was adapted into the UK film The Rainbow , directed by Ken Russell , who had also directed the film adaptation Women in Love. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.