The Rainbow (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics S.)

Rating:
Summary: Rainbow rainbow rainbow
Review: This book is an odd case. I found it to be very campy (the title is an unintentional tipoff), and yet at the same time the psychological makeup of just about every one of these characters was very real. D.H. Lawrence really probes the every nuance of the mind, even if he is a bit repetitive. His symbols, metaphors & similes (esp. light and dark and flowers and birthing and fire and weather and animals and....just about all of them, should I keep going?) seemed a bit clunky, but always literary.

In the spectrum of the rainbow, Lawrence's prose style tends to favour the purple. This can make for some quite unfortunate, laughable passages. It's like the Romantic poets, and the way they get all worked up into a frenzy-- but without the lyric beauty. Lawrence is just TOO over-the-top to be taken seriously (at least by me). Very heightened emotion; these folk in 'The Rainbow' feel intensely, and Lawrence wastes no opportunity to tell the reader just what everyone is feeling. So... I like it? I guess. It's hard for me to tell.

Rating:
Summary: The Rainbow? Rocks.
Review: This is a book that needs to be read relatively quickly to get the full effect. A masterful, overwhelming, huge, almost perfect book. He trances the history of the main character through multiple generations of parents to explain in incredible detail the creation of the protagonist. The use of a long running darkness and light metaphor, echoes Conrad, and gives an erieness to the book, the best example of this is early in chapter 15, and incorporates some of his pro-nature anti-business themes.

His critique of industrialism and mindless consumerism at the expense of nature I found to be enormously topical. The concluding 10 pages, particularly the last 100 or so lines are truly epic and wonderful.

Entrenched in the middle of this long book, I found I stopped noticing lawrence's style. Though I repeat the recomendation of reading the book in large chunks.