One of literature’s most notorious
and controversial erotic novels, and also one of the most tedious and dull
reads imaginable. The plot is very straightforward. Wealthy Clifford Chatterley
is crippled in the trenches in World War One. His wife, Constance, unable to
gain sexual satisfaction from him, establishes an affair with the working class
gamekeeper, Mellors, who works on their estates.
The neighbours, especially Mrs.
Bolton, who respects Clifford, begin to get suspicious. Constance plans to have
a surrogate baby to Mellors. She is due to go on a holiday in Venice with her
sister and hopes to make out that she was impregnated during the break, but her
pregnancy has too obviously begun before she travels. Gossip breaks out in her
absence when Mellors’s estranged wife turns up making trouble for him in
Constance’s absence, creating quite a scandal in the town. Though he had
vaguely promised to stand by his wife if she got with child from another, the
scandal of her affair with the uncouth, working class gamekeeper is too much
for him, and Clifford decides to leave her.
The first half of the book deals
with Lawrence’s condescending views on the working classes and the characters
do little more than have lengthy conversations about socialism and wealth.
There are some interesting comments on the decline of the colliery industry,
but of course, the book mainly attracts people who want to read the sexual content.
When the sex comes, it is poetic and powerful, but the long wait for it makes
the book interminably difficult to read. The lovers begin to discuss their
private parts as separate entities, and give them their own personalities, Lady
Jane and John Thomas. Mellors is described in very down to Earth terms, but he
is gruff, and often insensitive. He often proves to be just plain downright
rude to everyone needlessly, but he stands by Constance when all others, except
her own father, abandon her.
At one point, Constance tries to
get a former admirer to take responsibility for her love child to be, but he
just tries to blackmail Constance into posing for his paintings in the nude,
which she declines to do.
Unconvincing characters, dull political sermonising and precious little of the sex and bad language that was to get the book banned for so long and create one of the greatest court cases in British literary history. Anyone reading Lady Chatterley for pure titillation is going to be extremely disappointed.
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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