Alone At Work With D H Lawrence

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

I was working yesterday (Saturday) in the afternoon/evening shift and had known beforehand that it was going to be one of those days where not much was going to be done because of things outside my control. In this case mainly involving the oddly shaped ball that Wales was going to be using playing France in the last match of the Six nations series.

That, with the probability that many Welsh fans were going to becoming Irish for their subsequent game against England and the generally miserable weather outside the window meant that there was going to be plenty of time for me to continue reading The Rainbow by D H Lawrence.

Trouble was that unlike the previous times this opportunity came my way it was going to be with that Lawrence guy. The one that drives me up the wall and down again with either his pretentious twaddle or mind numbing boredom.

So there I was, alone with D H Lawrence, the literary equivalent of being stuck in a lift with someone you don't like but trying to be polite.

And if you ask why don't I just try another book. Well I've always believed that the reader should follow the principles of a Mastermind quiz master in that "I've started so I'll finish".

It began interestingly, an East Midlands farmer marries a Polish woman in the 1840's. Now that did cause me to suspend my belief from a very high level. After all the chances of a British farmer marrying a Pole are about as remote as they will be in a few years time when Brexit takes hold. Still despite some really outlandish prose he got my attention.

But then everything for me went typically Lawrence. First you get a thousand words being written when twenty could do. The man in the lift had suddenly produced a bottle of whisky in his pocket. This was literature as alcoholism

And just like a non violent drunk it suddenly gets all maudlin and dull. Page upon page of utter boredom. I was reading and thought to myself "What is the point of all this?"

He'd fooled me before. The last D H Lawrence fiction I'd read was his final novel Kangaroo. Where I began interested and finished solely grateful that I could put the book back on the shelf.

And do you know what the worst thing about reading on the Kindle is? It's that it tells you how long you've got left before the agony is over. One hour twenty one minutes (yes it's that precise). It would really have to do something for Lawrence to stop being one of the regular villains of this blog.

Until the next time.