Tag: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Elif Batuman – The Idiot

I bought Elif Batuman’s The Idiot because I wanted to read a contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which I suppose makes me the idiot on this particular occasion, since the connection to Dostoevsky is tenuous. Instead, it’s a novel about a naïve student on her first year at Harvard who falls in love and spends the summer in Hungary. It’s a novel with ideas, if not quite a novel of ideas. Selin, the protagonist, studies things like linguistics and the philosophy of language, and reads books like The Magic Mountain, and has an opinion on Dostoevsky. However, on the level of language this is more akin to Sally Rooney than Mann or the Russian. It’s all light and easy sentences, dialogue smooth as someone letting a slinky slide between two outstretched arms, and disorganised observations of things in rooms. It’s real in the way reality TV is real – it is existence absent of any redeeming light.

One of the criticisms I might make of it is that so much of its four hundred, easy-to-read pages, feels meaningless. The things caught in our narrator’s gaze often have neither narrative nor thematic relevance; their purpose is to make reality feel real, but often they don’t even seem to do that. The interactions between characters are regularly similarly lightweight. Yet the novel as a whole might make for itself the defence that it is actually serious about meaning, that such scenes are essential to its construction, that I am the one misunderstanding it. For indeed, being a work about language, love, and communication, it tries to treat seriously the shifting presence and absence of meaning in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps. The fact that I sit here writing this suggests maybe it’s a case worth making.

The Idiot begins in 1995 with Turkish-American Selin arriving at Harvard to begin her undergraduate studies. She meets her roommates and her classmates. She majors in linguistics and studies things in the philosophy and psychology of language. She volunteers a little of her time to teach maths and English as a second language, largely without success. She goes to the odd party but barely drinks and certainly does nothing sexual. There are many characters who drift in and out, largely undifferentiated, but there are two that are important – Ivan, an older Hungarian man Selin meets during Russian class, and Svetlana, a Serbian girl from the same class. Ivan provides a kind of love interest for Selin, while Svetlana is a kind of worldly motherly figure for her. In the summer break Selin goes to Paris with Svetlana, and from there on to Hungary, where she is to teach English to some Hungarian village children.

It makes sense to start with language, since these are the ideas that underpin the novel as a whole. With her linguistics studies, Selin tries to make sense of language itself by considering how language could be explained to Martians, or by them to us. “Supposing we went to Mars and the Martians said “gavagai” every time a rabbit ran by”, it would not be possible to know whether this referred to running, or rabbits, or something else entirely. Selin finds this depressing, as this early introduction to communication seems to suggest we cannot communicate, that meaning is trapped inside of us, never to get out. Naturally, this is an introductory class, so the fact that Selin can’t get anywhere towards solving this problem is one of those examples where a text seems to provide a problem that contains the seeds of its own later dissolution. (She should keep studying as it’s obvious she does not have the full picture yet).

The novel also challenges this “communication doesn’t work” idea through a short story for Russian learners whose chapters are scattered throughout its pages. This tells of a girl called Nina who goes to Siberia after the man she loves disappears, but one of its quirks is that the text is simplified to focus on the grammatical structures the learners are currently focusing on, such as a particular grammatical case. While the story contains plenty of miscommunications, the fact that a coherent narrative can be produced even with such obvious linguistic limitations rather suggests that it is people who are failing to communicate, rather than language itself. In other words, meaning’s general transferability is not precluded by language. Rather, it is people who are the problem. I found this a little unsatisfying – The Idiot introduces a problem only to deny it is one.

This sense that people are the problem is one we might have picked up on from the novel’s title, of course. Selin is naïve – in this she has something in common with Prince Myshkin. Since she is naïve and innocent she struggles with the articulation of her own emotions towards Ivan, turning from speech to lengthy emails that might work if they were not themselves, inevitably, an exercise in avoiding communication – they talk indirectly, and so do not reach the destination:

“Dear Selin, would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon?  Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?”

The above is one of Ivan’s, though Selin’s are no better. At times they also use Russian, a language neither of them knows well, which naturally enough does not help either. These are two people failing language. This is a point stressed when Selin is in rural Hungary teaching English, and trying and failing to fight a local fellow-teacher who insists one pronouncing all the silent vowels in English. “One”, becoming “oh-neh”, for example. Selin herself does not really seem to realise that teaching requires effort on her part, so while she is critical of her co-teacher she gets nowhere with her own students – “Papel iss blonk”, one of them says, for “the paper is white”. Failure, but human failure, everywhere.

These failures mean that Ivan and Selin do not connect in the way they should, or could, and create joint meanings together. They leave things unsaid, or said in a distorted manner. In this they are like teenagers, however, rather than people seriously struggling with a higher-order problem about the possibility of meaning transference. We might say that Batuman wants to make a point about culture here, and its relationship to this connection-building among people. Hungary and America (or Turkey) are different! Look, Ivan hasn’t read Walden. Again, the text raises this potential problem only to refute itself. The Hungarians and Turks can bond, we are told, over the shared indignities of the collapse of empire – “Trianon! Touché!” one of the Hungarians says. Even the legendarily strange Hungarian language is demystified by Batuman stressing the similarities and loanwords common to it and Turkish.

It is perhaps wrong to disparage a book called The Idiot for having an idiot at its centre or suggesting that the ideas she encounters are really less important than her own failures. (Would this not mean that writing a novel called “A bad book” would always be good, unless it were excellent?) Yet it’s wrong to dismiss how corrosive the idea of human failure can be when it becomes central. A lot of Russian novels – and Batuman loves Russian novels enough to have written a whole book on them – centre on the gap between the idea and the reality of human practices. Raskolnikov’s theory of murder, and the reality of a bloodied axe, for example. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this and what The Idiot does. Raskolnikov or Bazarov discover that human failings cause issues for their philosophies. Selin has no philosophy to be challenged, so ideas cannot be central to the work, no matter what other reviewers on the cover might say.

Perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the ideas and their potential for realisation. Communication is possible. Sometimes it’s hard, but that’s allowed. The theories on it are developed and probably, to a certain extent, the result of real thought and experimentation. Utopias, as far as we can make out, are not possible. The ideas fail because they imagine an incorrect view of human nature. Communication eludes Selin not because the theories are wrong, but because she is naïve, childish, and doesn’t really put any effort in. One approach becomes universal because it’s about all of our failings, while the other is about an individual’s failings which she will probably sort out once she has grown up a little.  

I have gone quite far from what I actually thought is the most interesting thing in this book – its use of section breaks. While Ivan and Selin’s not-relationship is the central story of the book, the bulk of it is taken up with Selin’s day-to-day experiences of being a new student in a big university. When I was about sixteen and thought I could teach myself writing through an entirely formulaic approach, I read in various places that my sections could never be shorter than 1’500 words and should always include some kind of conflict. This number has stuck with me even as it has never helped me much with my own writing. With The Idiot, Batuman doesn’t follow this rule either. Many of its sections are impressionistic and under a page in length. They accumulate, creating a sense of Selin’s experience of Harvard. They are snatches of conversations, or things spotted from a window. They are not, really, meaningful – even within a mesh of novelistic themes and meanings. But they are the brocade out of which the novel as a whole is built.

What is mildly interesting here is the way that Batuman builds meaning into this use of length and brevity. On the one hand, this is most obvious in the way that once the not-romance gets going, the sections with Ivan are considerably longer than the sections without him. It’s a quite direct way of putting the disorganised meaninglessness of the earlier sections into perspective by showing the paucity of their development quite literally on the page. On the other, and more thematically curious, is the way that this relates to Selin’s friendship with Svetlana. There is a moment when Svetlana reveals that she used to be bulimic and the narrative cannot contend with this fact, so the section just ends. It’s not presented as something deeply revealing from Svetlana within context, but Selin’s lack of reaction is another indication about the meaning-problem of the novel. Selin is yet again too immature, too naïve, to appreciate what her friend has told her. It’s not relevant to her own story.

If there’s something close to an epiphany to cap The Idiot, it’s the discovery by Selin that she is not the centre of the world, only of her world. This little bulimia mention is one example, as are the countless new people that she meets in Hungary: “I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.”

I can be charitable and say that the novel begins with a meaningless mass of impressions, grows more formally clear at its centre with Ivan, then ends up with a return to those same disconnected impressions. Only this time, Selin has a new consciousness of what they mean through her slightly-increased maturity. She has a sense that even if they are disconnected and non-narrativised to herself, they may be formed and clear in others’ worlds. Indeed, perhaps that’s one hidden message of all the teaching in the novel – that a teacher, like Selin herself, can have an impact on her students far greater than she herself would ever know.

Anyway, it was a reasonably funny, easy-to-read, work of contemporary fiction. Now I can go back to the dead.

Seven Years of Mostly About Stories

I have invested, perhaps foolishly, in a few friends’ startups, and my reward so far has been a few years’ worth of monthly updates that tell me that things are happening and people are working. Even if I don’t receive any money back, I still enjoy this sense of a joint journey, of being carried by the same wave. You, reader, are also an investor, albeit with your time rather than money, in me and what I make here, and to you I owe an update too. It doesn’t quite sit right with me to have a blog, which is inevitably personal in outlook and even features the first person singular pronoun at regular points, and yet to exist so shadily. One never knows, of course, whether you want me to exist as an independent entity, but I have my hopes on that score.

Indeed, I take as a vague principle that if you readers want properly academic writing, you head to Jstor, and that if you want the polished impersonality of a modern essay or review, you go to the New Yorker or LARB. In short, that if you are here, reading this, rather than merely stumbling on something on the internet while desperately trying to put together an essay for your studies, you must, in a certain sense, want this personal element, in other words, me. 

Life

Last year, I was entering the final stretch of a trainee programme at a large company and had moved to Germany. Over the course of last year, I finished this scheme and received a full-time position, also in Germany. This was a far from guaranteed outcome, and the high levels of stress associated with searching for a role in an unfriendly job market had a negative impact both on my reading and on my writing. All that is now behind us. The new work contract is permanent, and I have the full force of German unions and worker protections at my back to ensure any future moves will be entirely voluntary.

I have spoken before about my enjoyment of stability, indeed my great need for it. After my unplanned exit from Russia in early 2022, I have more or less lived without even a year’s certainty ahead of me. I am not a person who savours spontaneity or the absence of structure. “Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be fierce and original in your works.” This quote of Flaubert’s is one I have always admired whenever I have seen it, and I can say that it has proven true for my own case too.

And what stability! My work contract is permanent. My rental contract, in a spacious and well-located flat, is equally permanent. Never before has the future been so secure, even if the new risks of stasis and stagnation have appeared for the first time on the horizon. This is a great blessing.

Writing

I finished a first draft of a reasonably lengthy novella and was pleased enough with it, an unusual thing, to show it to a few friends in exchange for some helpful feedback. During the dark days of the job hunt and the brighter-but-still-stressful days of the apartment and furniture hunt, I did not succeed in writing creatively. I was, however, last year blessed with ideas for two novels of, I think, great potential. Unfortunately, one is historical in nature and requires a condition of personal leisure that is currently unavailable to me. The other novel is already in progress.

Now that I have this external stability mentioned above alongside an excellent work-life-balance, there is neither any practical obstacle nor reasonable excuse available to me not to focus with redoubled efforts upon my ambitions of becoming a great, or at least reasonably good, fiction writer. I see this as consisting of three elements.

First, I must improve my experience. This I can do simply by living and paying attention. In a favourite phrase, it means keeping both eyes open and noting things down. Observations, images, snatches of phrases. One of my tasks for this year is to do this in a dedicated volume, as my diary is primarily an emotion-regulation tool now and hence no longer the best place for such things. I am not fundamentally concerned about my chances in this development area: I have had a reasonable number of interesting experiences to call upon already – in Russia, growing up in Scotland, and elsewhere. What I must do now is become the kind of noticer that can identify and place the perfect detail to turn mere remembered experience into a rich vividness.

Second, I must improve my background knowledge. Mostly About Stories is, I hope, a storehouse of at least some value in this regard, but the fact remains that there are significant areas where my knowledge is, in my view, insufficient. Reading – history, philosophy, criticism, art history, politics, economics, religion, current affairs – and so on, in conjunction with discussions, where possible, with those who know better, should answer this need. While I have a reasonable amount of free time outside of work, I cannot afford the truly scattergun approach of a writer of leisure. Therefore, this reading does need to be somewhat targeted. Learning is a project, and projects can be managed.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I must improve my technique. Many, many, writerly sins can be forgiven of people who know how to put together an incisive sentence in a style that is their own. Can’t do dialogue? Then give us the descriptive jewels of a Marquez paragraph, the chaotic mess of a Krasznahorkai, the hilarious brutality of Bernhard or the wondrous rhythms of Fosse.

Improving one’s technique is, of course, a matter of practice. It is also a matter of study. On this blog I have, I hope, provided the occasional example of the analysis of a wider work. Sometimes I even quote things, as if to inform readers that I have actually read the thing I’m talking about. But really, I am not attacking sentences enough. Increasingly, I contemplate doing blog posts on single paragraphs to really get to the heart of why they work. All this is necessary because while I am often pleased with what I write in my blog posts – there’s often a good sentence here or there, if I may say so myself – with my fiction this is almost never the case. Such focused study, getting closer to language itself, ought to remedy this. The late William Gass did this at times in his essays (e.g. “The Sentence Seeks its Form”), and I have great respect for such an approach.

These three areas are by and large how I think I can improve independently. Naturally, the criticism of trusted and untrusted persons on things I have written is also important, perhaps essential. But by and large, owing to my external situation, my focus is on personal development as it lies within my own hands. I am now 28 years old – a reality that at times strikes me as disappointing, but which is not objectively a catastrophe. I still view myself as being very much a journeyman or apprentice when it comes to writing. This is likely why I am so interested in style and technique. I view writing as a craft that I must work at before I can go around throwing pieces of paper in other people’s faces. Or rather, I want to say things, but I have enough respect for writing and readers to want to make sure I can say them well first.

Blog

Mostly About Stories, of course, has continued. I hope you have enjoyed some of the pieces. I know, and it pains me, that the quality can be variable. There’s always a tension here between my desire to give you something short, snappy, and polished, and my desire to note down in moderately organised paragraphs everything I possibly can about a book while still keeping the time I spend working on the posts reasonably under control. Since I read and write my posts primarily to learn, (and hope readers learn while reading as well), my natural tendency is always for a big baggy monster of a post. Occasionally, I do make unspoken resolutions for you to myself never to write anything longer than 1500, or 2000, or 2500 words. So far, this has not worked.

I have not posted as often as I had intended, annoyingly. I actually have a few posts stacked up which I just haven’t gotten around yet to posting, so it’s not even a dearth of reading or writing at my end which is to blame. I want, ideally, to put something out each fortnight. I do also, though I’ve said it’s unlikely, want to post things that are slightly more tightly written – though first it will be necessary to get through the backlog.

Numbers

When I started MAS, I looked around to see whether there was any information on how many viewers blogs like this actually get. There is a site that does a survey, linked here. Since I write about literature, an even less popular topic than books and reading in general, I still feel there’s value and interest in sharing my own specifically.

Anyway, last year’s total views was 103’546. As our first six-figure result this feels like a small milestone, even if it may just be the power of an accumulation of mildly interesting posts. While the majority of readers may well be people looking to write school and university essays about books they haven’t read, I am grateful for those among you who write comments that often make me feel you have read the book far better than I have, or who write me encouraging messages via the Contact form. And if you are just here to read and enjoy in silence, know that I’m grateful for your presence here too. It’s what I’d do myself.

Books

I would say that my greatest discovery this year has been the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. I had the impression that my post on The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea generated a lot of thoughts in readers – even the few friends who read the blog in real life mentioned it specifically when we caught up. I also enjoyed reflecting on Latronico’s Perfection, albeit slightly more than I enjoyed reading it.

Among the various things I read but did not write about, I received the greatest joy from Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty, about the relationship between ideas, life, and writing in the 19th century Russian novel, with a few forays into the Soviet period too. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves Russian literature and wants to know the historical interlinkages a little better, or perhaps just wants some new arguments to help articulate what possibly makes the literature special, if special it is.

Next

This year, I aim to write a first draft of the second of the novel ideas that came to me last year, the one that does not require months in a library. It is, however, at least in one sense, a novel of ideas. Hence, it does require plenty of reading – Camus, Sartre & de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, the Stoics, and the Christian Mystics, are all on my reading list and may appear here (in some cases again) later on. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m also going to read Dostoevsky again, for the first time since the 2022 Invasion. He’s necessary for the novel too.

I also aim to write slightly better blog posts and be mildly more consistent in posting them.

In general, I am excited for what discoveries lie ahead and for sharing them here, with you.

Uneasy Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is a frustrating book. I have a suspicion that it was probably supposed to be. Following the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family in Nottinghamshire in the 19th century, it is primarily the story of their struggles to assert themselves and their identities. While the older generations have only limited success, Ursula, the granddaughter of our original Brangwen hero Tom, is able to achieve something closer to what she wants for her (emotional) life.

That she does so is a little ironic. The Brangwens may be progressing financially and socially in the story, but it is clear that for Lawrence the world around them in late 19th and early 20th century England is not. Rather, it’s becoming increasingly more awful as continues to industrialize and modernise. What complicates this situation is that it is precisely the progress Lawrence dislikes – economic, educational, and social – which allows Ursula the chance to be herself in the way she thinks she ought. Otherwise, I think this might have been quite a one-dimensional book.

The Rainbow was my first full-length Lawrence, after a few of his poems and his well-known short story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”. The best compliment I can give him, not that I think he’d necessarily care for my feedback even if he weren’t dead almost a hundred years, is that he certainly has his own distinctive approach. The characters of The Rainbow only ever experience strong feelings. The best way to describe them for one who hasn’t read him is that they are like jugs of emotions just sloshing about more than real people. Regularly, the feelings pour over the brim and make a mess on the carpet.

Central to these emotions are love and hate, and the frustration that leads to their regular alternations. Anna Brangwen, the adopted daughter of Tom Brangwen, imagines her premarital life as like a torture cell where she could “neither stand nor lie stretched out, never.” She escapes her home by marrying Will Brangwen, son of one of Tom’s brothers. At first, things are good: “Gradually a low, deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord, tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together.”

Then, just as quickly, things are bad. First, she’s crying, and then he is. They are unable to talk to each other, and Will takes up drinking – the men in The Rainbow are always going up to the village to get drunk alone, and Will quickly joins their number. When they visit a cathedral – Will likes them as a kind of hobby – Anna decides to ruin his faith through mockery and doubt and largely succeeds, leaving him miserable. They then make up just as suddenly, and it almost seems as if Lawrence approves of this destruction because he suggests it leads to better sex. At another point, Will tries to seduce a stranger and when he returns home the result is the same – better sex. Both he and Anna no longer feel obliged to be good or obey or social norms, and their passion for one another reaches a new height. (I lost track of how many babies she has throughout the novel, or how many fallings-out.)

The only child who matters within this book, however, is Ursula, the eldest daughter. On the first page of The Rainbow we learn that the Brangwens are all born with a look of “expectancy” on their faces, and it is with Ursula that we get closest to fulfilment. In the background of the book’s several hundred pages, modernity has crept into the story. By the time of Ursula’s section, we have the occasional motor car and the Boer War to help us date things, while the suffragettes are trying to get women the right to vote. The Brangwen family has also grown. At first, they were reasonably well-off farmers, but the growth of towns nearby thanks to coal mining makes them more money and allows them to climb a little socially.

Most directly for Ursula, this helps her to become a teacher and try to live an independent life. She also then goes to college to actually train to be a teacher, which perhaps she should have done before doing the teaching. In between all this she has her experience of first love with the son of a friend of her mother’s, an extremely homoerotic experience with a female friend, and through her other acquaintances she also comes across such ideas as the cause of the suffragettes.

In general, however, and as I mentioned at the beginning, Lawrence seems very hostile towards the modern world. The corporal punishment Ursula has to mete out to her children at the freshly-built new school seems as demeaning to her as it is to them, while the teaching itself is unstructured and primarily rote-learning. The suffragettes are criticised for thinking about ideas rather than actual human fulfilment, and as for the growth of towns and urban spaces Lawrence memorably describes them as “a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin-disease”. People everywhere seem to be turning into machines, and Lawrence is no fan.

His own ideas are much more timeless, or at least timeless-seeming. There’s an emphasis on personal freedom and self-assertion, but mainly through passionate sex rather than upending society. In fact, there’s no real sense of society at all – Lawrence’s characters are all monstrous egotists only brushing against each other when their blood is pumping. The greatest moments are moments of nakedness – Anna dancing in her bedroom nude, or Ursula running on the beach naked. That’s the fulfilment everyone wants here and not the vote. But we might also notice, unsurprisingly, that even if a partner is present, these are moments of self-fulfilment rather than of joint, let alone of collective fulfilment. The men observing feel left out, alienated. (I am not sure Lawrence liked men who were not himself.)

Lawrence uses religious language and symbols to give his work a kind of mythic edge and his ideas the stamp of Truth. Early moments of love are described as “the light of the transfiguration”; at one point Ursula is compared to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; and cathedrals play a reasonably prominent role. The clear delineation between and essentialising of men and women, a sense of cyclicity (Brangwens on their first illicit strolls with lovers always seem to find the same paths to tread), and biblical images like a flood and the rainbow of the novel’s title, all make Lawrence’s narrator seem like someone presenting some timeless discovery, as if he has gone back to the root of things to find their real essence.

It is not so, of course. Lawrence may attempt to cloak himself in the Bible, but his main influences seem to be the classic German thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When we read that “she felt his will fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and obscure,” we think of Schopenhauer’s idea of a fallen humanity controlled by clashing wills. When we consider Lawrence’s rejection of modernity (“I hate democracy”, Ursula cries embarrassingly) and his love of the body, there’s more than a touch of Nietzsche and his successors in the Lebensphilosophie movement, while Freud is also here in much of the more detailed psychological assessments of the effects of modern society on the individual soul.

One is allowed to be influenced by others, of course, and Lawrence not being a real prophet does not devalue his ideas necessarily and certainly not his book as a whole. In fact, The Rainbow was banned in the UK for some years after its initial publication, which is generally a sign that it did reflect a certain truth. A truth about sex in particular – this is, undoubtedly, the sexiest book I’ve read which does not mention the male member once. Like de Sade, there’s a sense that even if Lawrence has a limited view of female empowerment, it’s one that still undermines the view that women exist only to be caregivers and dolls.

Overall, the ideas are actually reasonable enough; the problem is that, wishing to convince us of their Truth, Lawrence takes the easy option of disallowing debate or counterargument to exist. Characters are either sellouts to modernity who become like machines and are dropped by Ursula, or they are having great sex. I suspect there may be more to the matter than that. Anna has fifty babies, while Ursula gets engaged, goes on a mad one, and then breaks the whole thing off. The life of the body is good and fun, but I dislike the way Lawrence completely devalues the mind. I suppose once we accept he is right about everything we are supposed to stop thinking, if we were supposed to think at all.

One figure I thought of regularly while reading The Rainbow was Dostoevsky. Both he and Lawrence can only write characters whose emotional states are strained so taut you can hear the thrumming as soon as they leap onto the page; both he and Dostoevsky could have done with a better editor; both he and Lawrence have their own visions of how things are. But of the two, only Dostoevsky actually places his ideas against those of his enemies in such a way that even today, many readers can be quite convinced that he wasn’t really a toady old reactionary Christian nationalist. With Lawrence, you’d need to be an idiot to miss what he’s on about. Which altogether just makes him seem naïve and a bit silly, even before we start thinking about the ideas themselves.

Yet this is not a bad book by any stretch. One reason why this is so is the tension I noted at the start on the subject of modernity. Ursula goes to a better school than her parents, she is able to get a job where her mother gets none, and I might even suggest that her willingness to have sex while ultimately backing out of marriage indicates that she was not entirely deaf to some of the more radical ideas her suffragette friends may have been mentioning. In other words, her choices do not come out of nowhere – the world may be getting worse, but it is also opening up new opportunities for achieving the kind of self-realisation that Lawrence definitely loves.

There’s an irony in all that which he may have noticed himself. Such an irony, and the question of how much self-fulfilment Ursula will actually get within that world, makes her part of the novel by far the most interesting. Indeed, it even sustains itself into a sequel, Women in Love, which I will probably read at some point. This, and the occasional richness of the sloshing-about of these characters’ sensual emotions, makes The Rainbow quite the sensual experience. Just one that I will not rush to return to until I have gone outside and first touched the grass.