Reviews for The Rainbow

The average rating for The Rainbow based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-27 00:00:00 Karin Mccleery "The situation was almost ridiculous. 'But do you love him?' asked Dorothy. 'It isn't a question of loving him,' said Ursula. 'I love him well enough--certainly more than I love anybody else in the world. And I shall never love anybody else the same again. We have had the flower of each other. But I don't care about love. I don't value it. I don't care whether I love or whether I don't, whether I have love or whether I haven't. What is it to me?' And she shrugged her shoulders in fierce, angry contempt. Dorothy pondered, rather angry and afraid. 'Then what do you care about?' she asked, exasperated. 'I don't know,' said Ursula. 'But something impersonal. Love--love--what does it mean--what does it amount to? So much personal gratification. It doesn't lead anywhere.' 'It isn't supposed to lead anywhere, is it?' said Dorothy, satirically. 'I thought it was the one thing which is an end in itself.'" When I think of epic masterpieces, I think of something of Tolstoyian length, an 800 to 1200 page monster that will consume your life for a month or two. My Everyman's Library edition of The Rainbow weighs in at 460 pages, a rather modest number to achieve such a distinction as epic. And yet here I am declaring this an epic masterpiece. It has been decades since I've read D. H. Lawrence. I was reading The Unexpected Professor by John Carey, and he talked about a lot of books, but in particular, it was his discussion of spending a summer reading all of Lawrence's works that inspired me to consider returning to Lawrence. Carey wrestled with Lawrence, not of the homoerotic desire type, but with his structure and style. He couldn't really say he enjoyed him or liked him, but he couldn't stop reading him! Aye, I understand that perfectly. I would read a big chunk of this book and set it aside, only to return to it a few days later and read another big chunk. I finally became exasperated with myself and decided to devote myself to Lawrence. In a flurry of hot reading, where I was completely immersed in the damp, black soil and the twisted sheets of the sexual revolution happening in the Nottinghamshire countryside, I finished the book, leaving myself completely spent, completely satisfied, wishing I smoked because I was in desperate need of something to settle down my hammering heart and my frayed emotional psyche. This is a story of three generations of the Brangwen family. We have Tom and Lydia, then Anna and Will, and finish with Ursula and her torturous relationship with Anton Skrebensky. Through these characters, Lawrence explores the larger concepts of what relationships really are and our expectations for them. Certainly sex is a part of it, but what is more interesting for me is the emotional reactions that people have to one another. The misunderstandings, the misplaced passions, and ultimately with Ursula, a rejection of the need to submit to the suffocating baggage of a permanent, committed relationship. Tom is the second husband for Lydia, which unbalances the relationship. Tom is caught up in the grand passions of his desire for his wife, but she doesn't gulp her passions like he does. She sips them. She is more measured because she, in so many ways, has been made older from her past experiences in more than just years. "It was not, he had to learn, that she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that she should want him. It was that she could not. She could only want him in her own way, and to her own measure. And she had spent much of life before he found her as she was, the woman who could take him and give him fulfilment. She had taken him and given him fulfilment. She still would do so, in her own times and ways. But he must control himself, measure himself to her." How many times do relationships fail because we try to change the person we are involved with into who we want them to be, or maybe we want to cocoon them as they are so that they never change from the person we first fell in love with? Lawrence is adept at hitting the reader with these great moments of understanding when everything that had been so murky becomes so clear. "She did not know him as himself. But she knew him as the man. She looked at him as a woman in childbirth looks at the man who begot the child in her: an impersonal look, in the extreme hour, female to male. Her eyes closed again. A great, scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing off into the infinite." Anna Lensky, who is Lydia's child by her first marriage but was raised by Tom Brangwen, marries Will Brangwen. Like most of us, she is swept up in the romance of the courtship when desire supersedes all else. That time when the possibilities are endless. Once the reality of marriage hits and she can see the halcyon days of her childhood disappearing forever in the mists of the past, she starts to rebel. She is sensitive and assumes much from Will's inability to always express himself in terms of reassurance. She lashes out at what he loves, wanting him to share her growing misery. Tom, for all intents and purposes her father, really puts a fine point on exactly what is driving Anna to make Will so miserable. "'You mustn't think I want to be miserable, ' she cried. 'I don't.' 'We quite readily believe it,' retorted Brangwen. 'Neither do you intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.'" It is quite a shock to settle into quiet domesticity. Anna wants for little, but for all that, there is certainly something missing. The fresh linen feel of the courtship faze has been replaced by sheets that have been washed and washed again. It is a question we all reach at some point in our lives, sometimes many points in our lives,…Is this all there is? Will is crazy about her, but doesn't always know how to tell her, and she takes maybe too much pleasure out of torturing him about his beliefs, but the fury this inspires does eventually prove to be an aphrodisiac. So this all brings us to Ursula Brangwen, the oldest daughter of Will and Anna. She has opportunities that no female has ever had before in her family. She goes to college. She holds down a job outside the home. She experiences a level of independence almost equal to what she would have had if she had been born a man. This isn't just given to her. She has to fight her family for it. As she feels herself become mired in the same marriage traps that her grandmother and mother surrendered to, she can't let herself submit. She must escape. She wants to exist independently, not only from a husband and her family, but from everyone. She wants to always have choices and options to be who she wants to be without hindrances and to be able to seize the day without considerations. She wants to be loved without commitment and love without being subjugated. This was heady stuff to be published in 1915. Lydia submits to a marriage, but with her eyes wide open, and refuses to become what her husband wants her to be. Anna, in many ways spoiled with too much freedom, rebels and tries to break her husband, only to discover that the cost to both of them is too great. Her rebellion is short lived, and she gives herself over to her children, but in Ursula we can see the joining of her grandmother and mother in questioning the strictures of a society imposed submission to a man. Why must she? Lawrence considered this, rightly so, to be a feminist novel. Barbara Hardy, in the introduction, gives this thought an intriguing twist. "Ursula is the first woman in English fiction who is imagined as having the need and courage for a sexual odyssey." Ursula rails at one point, Why can't I love a hundred men? Why must I choose one? The adventures of Ursula continue in Women in Love. I will, of course, be continuing my wrestling match with Lawrence. I would say, at this point, it might be a draw. I can only hope he is as spent as I am and will be content to lie a bit and stare at the sky and contemplate the odysseys of these women before we have to grapple once again. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit I also have a Facebook blogger page at:

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-28 00:00:00 George Harangody [one is the teacher of the other (hide spoiler)]