I did not go in with high expectations; I had heard a lot about Lawrence being one of those classic authors who is morbidly dull, despite the famous obscenities. I fully expected to tire of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' fairly quickly, to abandon it and give my copy to charity (I like to have read at least a few pages of famous books and authors, so I can know their work Not My Thing), so I was very surprised that 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' was not actually terrible - in fact I rather liked it.
Although very conservative in outlook, Lawrence wrote good female characters which are still better than many written nowadays. The sex scenes, while tame and quaint to modern standards, are of course quite funny, and if you read with imagined old fashioned prudishness, they are shocking (the word 'loins' is used far too much; 'cunt' and 'fuck' are far more common than I expected). The story and the characters are all strangely believable; interactions and conversations do not seem unnatural. A scene where two characters get drunk together made me laugh out loud because I felt like I'd overheard their desultory drunk talk in real life. There are discussions about the differences between males and females, the importance of the class system, and how awful the modern world and industrialization are. Lawrence's eloquence here is enjoyable even when you disagree with the view he clearly favours.
D.H. Lawrence was from Nottinghamshire, and this novel is set there. I live in Nottingham. His descriptions of newly industrial Nottinghamshire, of industry destroying the countryside, were an interesting comparison to the current post-industrial reality. Lawrence describes Mansfield as 'that once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town'. Now Mansfield has one of the highest child poverty rates in the county, and about a fifth of its population are unemployed. It is very far from romantic now.
There's a sense of foreboding in the descriptions of the mining industry. Lawrence is sure it must collapse; at times he feels like an apocalyptic prophet warning of civilization's doom. He treats the working classes as almost another species; his descriptions of the pit workers are reminiscent of Tolkien's orcs. His views echo Tolkien's conservatism: the beautiful rural shire is threatened by smoke-billowing industry and its dirty, scruffy workers who don't care for the woods anymore. I wonder how much Lawrence would have loved Thatcher.
'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is a frank story of a difficult extra-marital affair within a strict class system. It's historically interesting, due to the sex scenes and the obscenity trial, due to Lawrence's opinions and his descriptions of Nottinghamshire. It's well-written: the characters are distinct and believable; the prose is pleasant and sometimes beautiful. There's so much to read into it, I now understand why Lawrence is so popular in literature courses. I expect I wouldn't be so enthusiastic about this novel if I had been expecting it to be great. As it is, I was pleasantly surprised and will not rule out reading another of Lawrence's works.
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