Sons and Lovers (1913)

This book took me a while to get through. I wasn't into fiction during winter, the first third of the book is unnecessary to the main of it, and Lawrence spends an awfully long time describing flowers, trees, and other such natural scenes.

But boy was it worth it. The descriptions of nature serve to draw out the main moments and let them breathe and take up significance. And they really do: Sons and Lovers, first published in 1913 manages to achieve something I can't really say I have found elsewhere now - an honest portrayal and description of the emotional map of life, the instinctual animal feelings that drive so much of our social behaviour and experience, and to do so in English as a first language. This is so much more than a refreshingly wide embrace of Freudian frameworks of looking at human relations, which we would do well to recover in contemporary writing. It is remarkable and blows my mind to see that English can be used this way. It is not that English is such a necessarily cold and mercantile/scientific language, but rather that we have developed a culture that has produced it as such. Lawrence shows us another way.

Our emotional lives, the emotional decisions of parents and families, set up real consequences for the lives of all of us. It was lovely to read a story that centres this understanding so significantly. More please! ( )

This was not my favorite book by Lawrence, although it was more readable than Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover- there was less philosophizing. Although it contain elements of Lawrence's major themes such as the conflict between the life of the mind, body and spirit, this conflict plays out through the actions of the characters instead of through soliloquies as in his later novels. It also touches on the issue of euthanasia, and most importantly, parenting.
The story begins with a marriage between Gertrude and Walter Morel which quickly deteriorates into a battle of wills. Mrs. Morel puts all her energy and love into her son Paul.
"At last, Mrs. Morel despised her husband. She turned to the child, she turned from the father... There began a battle between the husband and wife- a fearful, bloody battle that ended only with the death of one."
Her death leaves Paul lost and alone, unable to truly give himself completely to any woman.

" 'Mother!" he whispered-'mother!'
She was the only thing that held him up, himself amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her."

Of course, the character Gertrude Morel is an extreme example of over parenting- or as we now call it- helicopter parenting, but Lawrence examines her inner life, as well as her son's, in a compassionate way.
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He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body and not him. ( )

I picked up Sons and Lovers as the next book to read from my 100 Books list, simply because I'm trying to cull my book collection at the moment, and years of hearing how much people dislike D.H. Lawrence – and this book in particular – led me to assume that I'd have a similar reaction. Really, I should've known better. After all, I like Conrad!

I find it fascinating that so many people have been bored senseless by Sons and Lovers, because I was interested and entertained from start to finish. It's true that there is not a great deal of plot here. Rather, it's a book that focuses on character and on family relationships. It's slow-moving and slightly dreamy tale, and Lawrence holds his characters at something of a distance from the reader, but I was nonetheless ensnared very quickly in the piece.

Most of the characters here are awful. There are no genuinely likeable people amongst them. Annie is quite inoffensive and I found myself rather sympathetic to Walter Morel, despite his faults, possibly because of how keenly he was judged by his family for his lack of pseudo-middle-class airs. Or perhaps it's just that Gertrude and Paul are just so utterly detestable that I feel a kind of solidarity with anyone they disdain. I feel a bit cruel saying so, given that Sons and Lovers is highly autobiographical, but Lawrence certainly didn't represent himself in his best light when he took on the guise of Paul Morel. And I feel utterly sorry for Jessie Chambers, upon whom Miriam was based, because Miriam is portrayed with such disgust. Clara, too, is sneered at and the reader is left to wonder whether it is merely Paul Morel who has such a Madonna/Whore complex (to go with his Oedipus Complex), or whether that stemmed from Lawrence himself.

Despite the ghastly characters, however, I found Sons and Lovers itself thoroughly likeable. The writing is lovely – elegant but not overwrought – and I'm a big fan of these kinds of slow, intimate stories of family and human nature. I shall be very interested to see whether my enjoyment of Sons and Lovers extends to all of Lawrence's work. In the meantime, this will not be joining the pile of books to give away!
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Disappointing. ( )