"What the Fog Conceals" by R A Marno

This is either a work of genius or it isn't.

Recently, I sat for two hours in the cinema watching Nostalghia, a film from celebrated director Andrei Tarkovsky. I was baffled. People moved incredibly slowly through surreal scenes. The camera panned in or out at a snail's pace. Very little made sense. Cineastes have told me it is a classic but a film buff friend with whom I watched it asked: is this a case of the Emperor's new clothes?

This novel felt like that. It is divided into chapters, each one told in the past tense from the third person point of view of one of the characters. The characters move and think slowly. They seem to spend their entire time wandering around a stately home, along corridors, from room to room, frequently pausing at a door of a room which they then decide not enter. In most of the chapters, they are alone. They discover strange things such as keys, or accounts ledgers, or maps, or buttons, or scraps of ribbon, and - in almost every chapter - a piece of paper, almost always folded, which has been wedged somewhere it wasn't before. This piece of paper will contain, usually, a gnomic inscription. These are, presumably, clues to a mystery. But there are so many of them that the reader loses track, unless they start noting things down - at which point they discover discrepancies that suggest unreliable narration. At this point (about chapter 9 out of 30) I started to lose the will to read on. 

These leitmotifs were repeated so frequently, and so regularly, that I started to giggle when the next one came. The fog is thickening again, now it's thinning, oh no, it's getting thicker. Floorboards are creaking even though no-one is stepping on them. A door is ajar, another door is ajar, yet another door is ajar. Edward touches a latch, Kate touches a latch, Harriet touches a latch. This room is subtly different, the furniture has moved. And here's another map and, - guess what? - the map doesn't quite conform to the actual layout of the estate. This ledger has some blank pages: that must mean something. Here's a name, here are initials, here's a number. I felt as if I was trapped inside an automaton. I think I was supposed to feel mystified, horrified, I think I was supposed to feel impending doom, but it seemed more like farce. 

I really wanted to like this book.

The prose is exquisite but at the same time pompous, portentous. I was impressed by the first few chapters. After that, I was deadened by the funereal rhythm of the sentences and irritated into mocking laughter by the repetitions. 

And what made it really difficult to read was when I began to recognise an ostinato. Almost every chapter is narrated in the past tense from the point of view of a 3rd person character: Harriet, Edward, Kate of Patrick. However, all the voices of the characters sounded the same. This intrusion of the author's voice was most obvious in some of the characteristic phrases:

• He tended to define things in terms of what they weren't:
• “This was not work. It was atonement.” (Ch 12)
• “It was not that the house was empty. It was that it was elsewhere, preoccupied with memory.” (Ch 14)
• “It had not been placed there for worship. It had been left there to haunt.” (Ch 15)
• “There was a quiet gasp from someone watching - not fear, not awe. Just release.” (Ch 16)
• This was frequently done with a not ... but form: 
• “It had been placed there - not dropped, not fallen, but left.” (Ch 14)
• “The gilded edge had warped slightly, not from damage, but from misalignment.” (Ch 14)
• “Not the stillness of repose, but the breathless hush of something standing just out of sight.” (Ch 14)
• “The names were not in order. They were not complete. But they were written with care.” (Ch 15)
• “Not physically. Not visibly. But in weight. In presence.” (Ch 18)
• “The past had returned not for apology, but for placement.” (Ch 19)
• “And yet, they had come. Not for spectacle. Not for guidance. But to witness.” (Ch 19)
• There was a great deal of use of very short sentences: 
• “When the line is crossed, it will not be redrawn. Only reburied.” (Ch 9)
• “The registry book was gone. Not moved. Removed.” (Ch 12)
• “A single name had been written in the centre: M. Quinn. No date. No notation. No cause.” (Ch 12)
• “No age. No date. No annotation.” (Ch 15)

A surprisingly high percentage of paragraphs were ended in this way. It felt like an authorial tic.

I wondered whether this was a mark of genius. Ravel's Bolero is repetitive and achieves its mesmeric fascination through its constant repetition (it is said to be every snare drummer's nightmare). But the effect on this reader was sometimes to be irritated and at other times to be lulled into sleepiness. It became difficult to concentrate. And there are so many little details that needed my full attention.

Having said that, the plot isn't that difficult. Perhaps it is too simple for the long build up, shrouded in possibly spurious mystery. Some people have gone missing from the estate surrounding the stately home; they have been forgotten. Now something is bringing back the memories of the disappeared. Sometimes it seems as if the house and the land itself is taking an active part in these prompts to remember, but presumably the house itself isn't writing cryptic comments on usually folded scraps of paper so there must be some human agency at work. I'm not sure I was concentrating hard enough to learn who, if anyone, was doing that. By the end, I couldn't be bothered. I didn't care.

And yet ... 

I wish I had enjoyed it. But in the end, I was exhausted.

Selected quotes:

• “The fog had not rolled in with motion, nor settled like a drifting veil. It had arrived with purpose - dense, deliberate - folding itself around the house and grounds with a finality that felt less like weather and more like erasure.” (C 1)
• “The land wasn't hidden; it was withholding.” (C 1)
• “Stillness, to Harriet, had always been a form of power. Movement betrayed uncertainty. Stillness let the world explain itself.” (C 1)
• “The silent precision of a woman who understood the house as both cathedral and tomb.” (C 1)
• “The house was not just offering memories - it was selecting them. Curating impressions.” (C 2)
• “He began to suspect that the house had not simply waited for him. It had summoned him.” (C 2)
• “Even the slope beyond the chapel had taken on a subtle lean, as though the ground itself had been exhaling too long, and now sought to reclaim its breath.” (Ch 14)
• “Every piece of the past was surfacing. Deliberately. She did not believe in hauntings, but she had begun to believe in persistence.” (Ch 15)
• “The light changed before she entered. The mirror in the upper corridor returned its image half a second too late. The fire in the parlour burned crooked if she lit it herself.” (Ch 25)

September 2026; 328 pages
Published by Salt Publishing in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Sons and Lovers" by D H Lawrence

Painted by Nottinghamshire artist Sheila Wood

An exploration of the Oedipus complex. Paul Morel, second son of his possessive mother, finds his soulmate in Miriam but his love for Mum makes it impossible for him to consider marrying the girl. Can he find love with married woman Clara?  

The Oedipus complex is, perhaps, the fundamental theme of the book:

• As a young boy: “Paul loved to sleep with his mother.” (Ch 4)
• Paul is torn between Miriam and his mother: “After all, she [his mother] was the chief thing to him, the only supreme thing.” (Ch 8)
• “And he [Paul] came back to her [his mother]. And in his soul was a feeling of the satisfaction of self-sacrifice because he was faithful to her. She loved him first; he loved her first. And yet it was not enough. His new young life, so strong and imperious, was urged towards something else. It made him mad with restlessness.” (Ch 9)
• “A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them forever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too different and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.” (Ch 11)
• “There was a good deal of his life of which necessarily he could not speak to his mother. He had a life apart from her - his sexual life. The rest she still kept. but he felt he had to conceal something from her, and it irked him. There was a certain silence between them, and he felt he had, in that silence, to defend himself against her; he felt condemned by her. Then sometimes he hated her, and pulled at her bondage. His life wanted to free itself of her. It was like a circle where life turned back on itself, and got no further. She bore him, loved him, kept him, and his love turned back in to her, so that he could not be free to go forward with his own life, really love another woman.” (Ch 13)

There are a number of religious references:

• When a drunken Walter Morel throws a drawer at his wife during a domestic dispute, cutting her brow, the blood drips onto baby Paul as a sort of baptism. (Ch 2)
• When Paul accidentally smashes his sister Annie's doll, he then decides to “sacrifice” her, burning her in a fire and then smashing what's left under stones. (Ch 4) Could this symbolise Paul's relationship with women?
• “Paul felt crumpled up and lonely. His mother had really supported his life. He had loved her; they two had, in fact, faced the world together. Now she was gone, and forever behind him was the gap in life, the tear in the veil, through which his life seemed to drift slowly, as if he were drawn towards death.” (Ch 14) The tear in the veil is a reference to the crucifixion; as Jesus dies, according to Matthew 27.51, Mark 15.38, and Luke 23.45, the veil in the temple which shrouded the Holy of Holies - so that only the priests who were permitted could see into the inner sanctum - was ripped in two.
• When Clara and Paul make love: “And after such an evening they both were very still. having known the immensity of passion. They felt small, half afraid, childish, and wondering, like Adam and Eve when they lost their Innocence and realized the magnificence of the power which drove them out of Paradise and across the great night and the great day of humanity.” (Ch 13)

There are some powerful descriptions:

• “The snowflakes, suddenly arriving on the window-pane, clung there a moment like swallows, then were gone, and a drop of water was crawling down the glass. The snowflakes whirled around the corner of the house, like pigeons dashing by. Away across the valley, the little black train crawled doubtfully over the great whiteness.” (Ch 4)
• “They all loved the Scargill Street house for its openness, for the great scallop of the world it had in view. On summer evenings the women would stand against the field fence, gossiping, facing the west, watching the sunset flare quickly out, till the Derbyshire Hills ridged across the crimson far away, like the black crest of a newt.” (Ch 4)
• “The limbs and bowed heads of six men struggled to climb into the room, bearing the coffin that rode like sorrow on their living flesh.” (Ch 6)
• “There was a great crop of cherries at the farm. the trees at the back of the house, very large and tall, hung thick with scarlet and crimson drops, under the dark leaves.” (Ch 11)

Other selected quotes:

• “There was the halt, the wistfulness about the ensuing year, which is like autumn in a man's life. His wife was casting him off, half regretfully, but relentlessly; casting him off and turning now for love and life to the children. Henceforward he was more or less a husk. And he half acquiesced, as so many men do, yielding their place to their children.” (Ch 3)
• “Mrs Morel ... had never expected him [Paul] to live. ... Perhaps it would have been a little relief to her if he had died. She always felt a mixture of anguish in her love for him.” (Ch 4)
• “If you don't like it, alter it, and if you can't alter it, put up with it.” (Ch 6) Mrs Morel's advice to her son Arthur.
• “She herself was something of the princess turned into a swine-girl, in her own imagination.” (Ch 7) An early description of Miriam: 
• “She wanted to show him a certain wild-rose bush she had discovered. She knew it was wonderful. And yet, till he had seen it, she felt it had not come into her soul. Only he could make it her own, immortal.” (Ch 7)
• Mrs Morel “She did not care for Miriam. ‘She is one of those who will want to suck a man's soul out till he has none of his own left,’ she said to herself.” (Ch 7)
• “They both were late in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive ... The slightest grossness made her recoil almost in anguish. ... But, perhaps because of the continual business of birth and of begetting which goes on upon every farm, Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood was chastened almost to disgust of the faintest suggestion of such intercourse. Paul took his pitch from her, and their intimacy went on in an utterly blanched and chaste fashion. It could never be mentioned that the mare was in foal.” (Ch 7)
• “A soldier! - and a common soldier! - nothing but a body that makes movements when it hears a shout!” (Ch 8)
• “‘You make me so spiritual!’ he lamented. ‘And I don't want to be spiritual.’” (Ch 8)
• “Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued, so will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.” (Ch 8)
• “Miriam was the threshing-floor on which he threshed out all his beliefs. While he trampled his ideas upon her soul, the truth came out for him. She alone was his threshing-floor. She alone helped him towards realization.” (Ch 9)
• “The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people - life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.” (Ch 10)
• “So long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me.” (Ch 10)
• “She's for ever on that ‘igh horse of hers, an’ its back’s that thin and starved it'll cut her i’ two one of these days.” (Ch 10)
• “She relinquished herself to him, but it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her.” (Ch 11): Miriam surrenders her virginity to Paul.
• “And afterwards he loved her - loved her to the last fibre of his being. He loved her. But he wanted, somehow, to cry. There was something he could not bear for her sake.” (Ch 11)
• “He knew he had landed her in a nasty hole, and was leaving her in the lurch. It angered him. ... He sat silent in bitterness. At last the whole affair appeared in a cynical aspect to him. She had really played with him, not he with her. She had hidden all her condemnation from him, had flattered him, and despised him. She despised him now. He grew intellectual and cruel. ... He sat in silence. He was full of a feeling that she had deceived him. She had despised him when he thought she worshipped him. She had let him say wrong things, and had not contradicted him. She had let him fight alone. But it stuck in his throat that she had despised him whilst he thought she worshipped him. She should have told him when she found fault with him. She had not played fair. He hated her. ... His heart was hard against her.” (Ch 11)
• “He loved to paint large figures, full of light, but not merely made up of lights and cast shadows, like the impressionists.” (Ch 12)
• “If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!” (Ch 12)
• “Miriam ... saw what he was seeking - a sort of baptism of fire in passion, it seemed to her. She realized that he would never be satisfied till he had it. Perhaps it was essential to him, as to some men, to sow wild oats; and afterwards, when he was satisfied, he would not rage with restlessness anymore, but could settle down and give her his life into her hands. Well then, if he must go, let him go and have his fill - something big and intense, he called it. At any rate, when he had got it, he would not want it, that he said himself; he would not want the other thing that she could give him. He would want to be owned, so that he could work. It seemed to her a bitter thing that he must go, but she could let him go into an inn for a glass of whisky, so she could let him go to Clara, so long as it was something that would satisfy a need in him, and leave him free for herself to possess.” (C 12)
• Clara’s view of Paul at the end: “He looked paltry and insignificant. There was nothing stable about him. Her husband had more manly dignity. At any rate he did not waft about with the wind. There was something evanescent about Morel, she thought, something shifting and false. He would never make sure ground for any woman to stand on.” (Ch 14)

Notes:

• Mrs Morrel's ancestors are said to have “fought with Colonel Hutchinson” (Ch 1); he was an MP and Army officer fighting for Parliament during the English Civil War; he also signed the death warrant of Charles I.
• Billy Pillins, really Billy Phillips, will later be mentioned in The Rainbow as a school mate of Ursula. (Ch 4) 
• The young Miriam is a fan of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, among her heroes are the “Rowenas, Brian de Bois-Guilberts, Rob Roys and Guy Mannerings.” (Ch 7) The first two appear in Ivanhoe, the second pair are the eponymous heroes of their own novels.
• One of Annie’s boyfriends is Jim Inger (Ch 7); Winifred Inger is the name of Ursula’s lesbian lover in The Rainbow.
• They holiday in Mablethorpe which is on the Lincolnshire coast slightly north of Skegness. My great aunt and uncle were from Nottingham and had retired to a little house in Mablethorpe.
• When they are on holiday they go to the “Coons”. This is presumably a blackface minstrel show. These are nowadays condemned as racist and the word ‘coon’ is racially offensive.
• In chapter 12, Paul and Clara dress up posh to go to the Theatre Royal in Nottingham to see La Dame aux Camelias, starring Sarah Bernhardt; this is a play (on which the opera La Traviata was based) about a courtesan.

It's more focused than The Rainbow, and easier to read. The characters are complex, each one being torn by opposite emotions. Assuming that Paul, the hero, is a portrait of the artist, this is a searingly honest portrayal, showing Paul as hugely damaged by his mother but also showing him as a bit of a shit, exploiting both his girlfriends.

September 2026; 491 pages

First published in 1913 by Heinemann in an edition edited by Edward Garnett who made many cuts. An unredacted text was not published until the 1992 Cambridge University Press edition.

My edition was published by Random House in 1936 and was therefore the redacted version.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other novels by D H Lawrence include:

• The White Peacock (1911)
• The Trespasser (1912)
• Sons and Lovers (1913)
• The Rainbow (1915)
• Women in Love (1920)
• The Lost Girl (1920)
• Aaron's Rod (1922)
• Kangaroo (1923)
• The Plumed Serpent (1926)
• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
• The Escaped Cock (1929), republished as The Man Who Died

Collection of short stories:
England, My England

"The Rainbow" by D H Lawrence

This rainbow soars over a housing estate nowadays, but the built arch was the doorway to a foundry which produced, among other things, a steam plough for Garibaldi.

 This novel was published in 1915. It is a multi-generational family saga.

There are multiple religious themes. 

• Will Brangwen, when courting Anna, is carving wood to show the Creation of Eve: God stoops over a sleeping Adam  and Eve "was issuing like a flame towards the hand of God, from the torn side of Adam." (Ch 4) But once he is married, he cannot continue with the work. Anna jeers at it: “It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man's body ... when every man is born of woman.” (Ch 6) So he burns it.
• When newlywed Will is enjoying an extended honeymoon, lying in bed with Anna in their new home, he feels "as though this house was the Ark in the flood, and all the rest was drowned." (Ch 6) Later on (Ch 9) there is a real flood and one of the major characters is drowned.
• As Ursula grows into sexuality, she is intrigued by the verse: "The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair" (Ch 10; quoting the King James Bible version of Genesis 6.2; a verse that is part of the reason given for why God sought to destroy mankind with a flood) and she wonders whether the Sons of God would have found her fair, and who these Sons of God were: "Was not Jesus the only begotten Son? Was not Adam the only man created from God? ... Had God many offspring, besides Adam and besides Jesus, whose origin the children of Adam cannot recognize? And perhaps these children, these Sons of God, had known no expulsion, no ignominy of the fall." (Ch 10) Ursula seems to be trying to come to terms, as children must in adolescence, with the fact that she is a sexual being, despite the apparent proscription of sexuality by the Church, as encapsulated in the Garden of Eden story that recounts that once Adam and Eve had disobeyed God by tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were ashamed of their nudity and made for themselves clothing. 
• This is one of the themes of the novel, that sexual love is spiritual, as shown in the heightened emotions of the following passages:
• “She was sure to come at last, and touch him. Then he burst into flame for her, and lost himself. They looked at each other, a deep laugh at the bottom of their eyes, and he went to take of her again, wholesale, mad to revel in the inexhaustible wealth of her, to bury himself in the depths of her in an inexhaustible exploration, she all the while revelling in that he revelled in her.” (Ch 2) 
• “But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallized with triumph, and his soul dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not anymore.” (Ch 11) And later "She began to caress him to life again. For he was dead.” Ursula has just kissed (yes, it is only a kiss) Anton. But it sounds like they have had sex. And the corollary of sex is that afterwards the man's penis is (usually) limp and must be encouraged to become erect again which is what sounds like is happening in that added line. But Lawrence is, perhaps, adding the religious overlay of the resurrection of Jesus after his death.
• “Darkness cleaving to darkness, she hung close to him, down to the source and core of his kiss, herself covered and enveloped in the warm, fecund flow of his kiss, that traveled over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the last fibre of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and she clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the very bottom-most source of him.” (Ch 15)
• When Anna gets pregnant “The blaze of light on her heart was too beautiful and dazzling, from the conception in her womb. She walked glorified, and the sound of the thrushes, of the trains in the valley, of the far-off, faint noises of the town, were her ‘Magnificat’.” (Ch 6) The Magnificat is the from Luke 1.46 - 55; it is a song which the Virgin Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus, sings. Here Anna is identifying herself with Mary and Lawrence seems to be suggesting that the everyday miracle of pregnancy has a spiritual dimension.
• "Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that all the religion she knew was but a particular clothing to a human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing, - the clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their Osiris." (Ch 12)
• The day after her first passionate kiss with Anton, Ursula goes to church and glances at Genesis ("her favourite book") in the Bible: "And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." (Genesis 9.1) Ursula seems to interpret this as a commandment to have have sex. Lawrence then has Ursula reflect on lines later in the chapter: "And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh." (Ch 11) This 'bow' is a rainbow and given that this is the title of the book, this must be significant. 
• There are two other mentions of the rainbow. Already Anna, at the end of chapter 6, Ursula being newly born, interprets the rainbow as an arched door, like a new day: "Dawn and sunset were the feet of the rainbow that spanned the day, and she saw the hope, the promise." She is pregnant again and sees herself as that door: "She was a door and a threshold, she herself. Through her another soul was coming" (Ch 6) Then, on the very last page, Ursula has a similar vision. Having dumped her lover and then discovered that she isn't after all, pregnant, she sees a rainbow and interprets it, as Anna did, as God promised in Genesis, as a symbol of hope: "And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a hew growth, rising in the light and the wind and the clean air of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earths new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven." Here we have a last remembrance of Zola's novel about mining communities, Germinal, in that word "germination". We have a hint of the flood that swept the corrupt world away. And we have the promise of renewal.

But this sprawling novel also touches on other issues:

Time and again, Lawrence, in part by giving sex such a spiritual charge, highlights the importance of having children over other activities:

• “It was so sweet and satisfying lying there talking desultorily with her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so evanescent. It was even irritating the way the church-clock kept on chiming.” (Ch 6) The best things in life, Will thinks, are lying in bed next to one's mate.
• “He did not attach any vital importance to his life in the drafting office, or his life among men. That was just merely the margin to the text.” (Ch 6) Will realises work is not important.
• “He wanted to loom important as master of one of the innumerable domestic craft that make up the great fleet of society. It seemed to her a ridiculous armada of tubs jostling in futility.” (Ch 6) Anna sees having a job as unimportant.
• “Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were a circle of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root and the flower.” (Ch 7) Even a cathedral is fundamentally about fecundity.
• “The altar was barren, its light gone out. God burned no more in that bush. It was dead matter lying there.” (Ch 7)

There is a scathing critique of the exploitation of those who labour in a mine. This seemed to draw on Germinal, Zola's 1885 novel about a mining community in France; indeed  the word 'Zolaesque' is used. The thesis is that the demands of the mine subvert morals and even shape the men working in it:

• "They believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and the place, rather than alter the pits and the place to fit themselves." (Ch 12) This reminded me of the thesis in The Time Machine by H G Wells that  humans would evolve into two species: one living lives of ease and happiness on the surface, the other toiling underground.
• “Marriage and home is a little side-show. ... Every man has his own little side-show, but the pit owns every man. The women have what is left.” (Ch 12)
• “Mrs Smith has two sisters who have just changed husbands. ... They're not interested enough to be very immoral - it all amounts to the same thing, moral or immoral - just a question of pit wages. The most moral duke in England makes two hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the morality end up.” (Ch 12)
• “There was a horrible fascination in it - human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery.” (Ch 12) This reminded me of Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

More scathing social comment is reserved for the school in which Ursula teaches: “The first great task was to reduce sixty children to one state of mind, or being. This state must be produced automatically, through the will of the teacher, and the will of the whole school authority, imposed upon the will of the children. ... Children will never naturally acquiesce to sitting in a class and submitting to knowledge. They must be compelled by a stronger, wiser will. Against which will they must always strive to revolt.” (Ch 13)

Nor is Ursula impressed by the teaching in her college:

• “The lecturer was a mouth-piece, a priest. As he stood, black gowned, on the rostrum, some strands of the whispering confusion of knowledge that filled the whole place seemed to be singled out and woven together by him, till they became a lecture.” (Ch 15)
• “What was Latin? - So much dry goods of knowledge. What was the Latin class altogether but a sort of second-hand curio shop.” (Ch 15)
• “This was no religious retreat, No seclusion of pure learning. It was a little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money. The college was a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory.” (Ch 15) Views diametrically against those of Mrs Gaskell in North and South in which a factory owner seeks tuition in the classics to culture himself and to become a gentleman.
• Her disillusion with learning culminates in a brilliant metaphor in which Lawrence inverts Plato's Allegory of the Cave: “She could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of the range, she saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the darkness, watching the vanity of the camp fire and the sleepers; she felt the strange, foolish vanity of the camp, which said ‘Beyond our light and our order there is nothing’, turning their faces always inward towards the sinking fire of illuminating consciousness ... ignoring always the vast darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes lurking on the edge. Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand Into the darkness. For if he did he was jeered to death by the others who cried, ‘Fool, antisocial knave, why would you disturb us with bogeys? There is no darkness. We move and live and have our being within the light, and unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge.” (Ch 15)

There is a lesbian affair between Ursula and one of her teachers but there's also a hint of male homosexuality when Tom Brangwen meets Winifred Inger who has been having a lesbian affair with Ursula. He looks at her and “Immediately, he knew they were akin.” This suggests that he's gay and so’s she. And that's why they get married.

So that's the content; what about the style. The prose is remarkable for its passion. This sort of stuff could easily be mocked, as Stella Gibbons did in Cold Comfort Farm, but Lawrence's passion has depth and is from the heart. 

• “In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blue like spray across the fallow, rooks appeared on the grey, watery heavens, and flew cawing into the winter. Then the men sat by the fire in the house where the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky, the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day.” (Ch 1) 
• “They were such strangers, they must forever be such strangers, that his passion was a clanging torment to him. Such intimacy of embrace, and such utter foreignness of contact! It was unbearable. He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know how entirely they were strangers to each other.” (Ch 1) He makes use of repetition to emphasise, almost to pound his words into the reader’s brain. This occurs time and again, and reminded me of the repetitions in the Bible. 

Selected quotes:

• “She was like one walking in the Underworld, where the shades throng intelligibly but have no connection with one.” (Ch 2)
• “His heart heavy as the sudden earth.” (Ch 2)
• “She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him.” (Ch 2)
• “How did she say he was old. He walked on in the rain, sweating with pain, with the horror of being old, with the agony of having to relinquish what was life to him.” (Ch 4)
• “Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anybody could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife! curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal.” (Ch 4)
• “There was no peace, however old one grew! One was never right, never decent, never master of oneself.” (Ch 4)
• “He did not count the days. but like a man who journeys in a ship, he was suspended till the coming to port.” (Ch 4)
• “Brangwen was staring away at the burning blue window at the back of the altar, and wondering vaguely, with pain, if he ever should get old, if he ever should feel arrived and established.” (Ch 5)
• “She had thought him just the bright reflex of herself. As the weeks and months went by she realized that he was a dark opposite to her.” (Ch 6)
• “He and she were not one. His heat was not always to suffuse her, suffuse her, through her mind and her individuality, till she was of one heat with him, till she had not heard own self apart. She wanted her own life. He seemed to lap her and suffuse her with his being, his hot life, till she did not know whether she were herself, or whether she were another creature.” (Ch 7)
• “He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.” (Ch 7)
• “She was the day-time, the daylight, he was the shadow; put aside, but in the darkness potent with an overwhelming voluptuousness." (Ch 8)
• “It was when they brought him to her house dead and in his wet clothes, his wet, sodden clothes, fully dressed as though he came from market, yet all sudden and inert, that the shock really broke into her and she was terrified. A big, soaked, inert heap, he was, who had been to her the image of power and strong life.” (Ch 9)
• “As Ursula passed from girlhood towards womanhood, gradually the cloud of self-responsibility gathered upon her. She became aware of herself, that she was a separate entity in the midst of an unseparated obscurity, that she must go somewhere, she must become something.” (Ch 11)
• “A fearless-seeming clean type of modern girl whose very independence betrays her sorrow.” (Ch 12)
• “She was brought to the conclusion that the human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good.” (Ch 12)
• “And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go.” (Ch 14)
• “The great notice-board with its fluttering papers seemed to slam away all sense of retreat and mystery from the far wall.” (Ch 15)
• “She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth.” (Ch 15)
• “What did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was. Only she was full of rejection, of refusal. Always, always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion, a falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She seemed always negative in her action.” (Ch 15)
• “But his eyes were quite still, like a washed sky after rain, full of a wan light, and quite steady, almost ghost-like.” (Ch 15)
• “I could love a hundred men, one after the other. ... Why should I not go on, and love all the types I fancy, one after another, if love is an end in itself?” (Ch 15)

Influences

It feels like a Victorian novel, such as The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler which was published in 1903. There's also a feel of the social novels of H G Wells, such as Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), and The History of Mr Polly (1910). The concept that humans might evolve as a result of industrialisation is mentioned; this was first explored by H G Wells in The Time Machine (1895). There's also a mention of the Invisible Man by H G Wells: “She was reminded of the Invisible Man, who was a piece of darkness made visible only by his clothes.” (Ch 15) And the use of the term "Zolaesque" in the context of a mining village, is presumably a reference to Zola's Germinal (1885).

In the run up to 1915, H G Wells and Arnold Bennett (Anna of the Five Towns) had started to prove that working class people could be novelists. The influence of Thomas Hardy might have given Lawrence the confidence to use dialect in his fiction.

Aftermath

The Rainbow was prosecuted for obscenity, seized and destroyed; it disappeared from the (English) market for 16 years. You can understand the objections of the moralists of the time. Not only does it treat sex as a natural and, indeed, spiritual part of everyday experiences, but it also includes passages an orthodox Christian might consider blasphemous, and it contains an episode of lesbian love. This was thirteen years before Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness celebrated sapphism and was successfully prosecuted for obscenity. Perhaps 'The Rainbow' set a precedent.

Notes:

The Pillens (Phillips) family, school pupils with Ursula, and teacher Miss Inger, are mentioned in Lawrence's debut novel, Sons and Lovers

Synopsis (spoiler alert):

The story stretches from the 1840s to about 1905, in the aftermath of the Boer war. It is set in a fictional village between Nottingham and Derby.

Tom Brangwen succeeds to the family farm. He marries the widow of a Polish refugee, who brings with her a daughter, Anna. The marriage is, like most of the marriages in this book, a bit of a battlefield, as both partners seek to maintain their individuality within the relationship. They have two sons, Tom junior, who studies to become an engineer and Fred who will eventually take over the farm. Many years afterwards, Tom drowns during a flood.

Anne grows up and marries Will Brangwen, the son of Tom's brother (who himself has a mistress). Will is a talented wood carver with artistic aspirations but in real life he is a designer of lace machines. Their marriage starts with bliss which soon degenerates into a struggle for domestic supremacy which Anna wins. She then settles down to breed a large brood of children.

Of whom the eldest is Ursula, an intelligent girl who has inherited her father's artistic and questioning mind and her mother's independent spirit. Her first love is Anton, son of a Polish refugee friend of her grandmother's, a soldier who goes off to fight in the Boer war. She then has a lesbian affair with her teacher who goes on to marry her uncle, Tom junior, who has become manager of a local mine.  Ursula then takes a job as a teacher and has to sacrifice her educational ideals in order to maintain some semblance of discipline. She then goes to college but finds what is being taught falls far short of her ideals of learning. She has an affair with Anton but decides to repudiate him in favour of promiscuity. Then, worried that she might be pregnant, she seeks him out again but he has already married on the rebound. 

September 2026; 496 pages
First published by Methuen in 1915
My Penguin paperback was issued in 1985

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other novels by D H Lawrence include:

• The White Peacock (1911)
• The Trespasser (1912)
• Sons and Lovers (1913)
• The Rainbow (1915)
• Women in Love (1920)
• The Lost Girl (1920)
• Aaron's Rod (1922)
• Kangaroo (1923)
• The Plumed Serpent (1926)
• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
• The Escaped Cock (1929), republished as The Man Who Died

Collection of short stories: 

• England, My England 

"The Wedding People" by Alison Espach

This funny, well-observed and sometimes profound novel opens with a stunning hook, when Phoebe, the only guest at the hotel not to be part of a week-long wedding party, announces to the bride that she is there to kill herself: “‘This is the most important week of my life,’ the bride pleads. ‘Same,’ Phoebe says.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)

Just before this was a very clever section in which two at first anonymous characters, guests at the wedding, are gossiping. Phoebe, the third person narrator, overhears them and thus the scene is set. It reminded me of how Shakespeare often has an early scene using two citizens chatting, but it seemed much more natural and integrated with the narrative.

But then there is a section of back story which (a) dampens some of the curiosity aroused - I wondered whether it would have been even better to have drip-fed many of these details into the story later - and (b) interrupted the narrative drive. 

The book then continues with a frankly unbelievable juxtaposition of two characters although I, as reader, forgave the unlikeliness because of my fascination with the ensuing cage fight.

And the book, like the wedding, continues, the author forever highlighting the contrast between the shallow consumerist extravagance of the celebrations and the real emotions of the people doing the celebrating. We soon become aware that not all is as perfect as it seems. We explore at least some of the characters. Some, like High Bun and Neck Pillow, are primarily there as foils and to provide comedy; they are what E M Forster calls 'flat' characters. But we explore the principals such as the bride and her mother, and the groom and his daughter, and Phoebe, and these characters are developed into complex and real-feeling persons. 

The plot is basically a set of opportunities to put these characters together and see what ensues. The reader than wants to know what will happen and this tension turns the pages. Did I anticipate the end? To some extent. But there are details left unresolved even on the last page.

It is told in the present tense and the third person from the sole perspective of Phoebe.

There are some moments of pure comedy, such as the delightful scene in which Phoebe, driving, is loaned a mobile phone from someone in the car so she can use sat nav ... only for sexts from the woman’s boyfriend to keep popping up.

The are some interesting discussions of literature (Phoebe teaches Victorian literature) and the book neatly parallels  Mrs Dalloway, another novel in which a party clashes with a suicide.

I learned other things as well. I learned that the Cubists “believed if you aren't seeing something from all sides, you aren't seeing fully.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party) And there are a lot of interesting thoughts about Life. 

Selected quotes:

• “The hotel ... sits on the edge of the cliff like an old and stately dog, patiently waiting for her arrival.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Wasn't that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal?” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Cinderella never would have been at the centre of the novel if her mother had lived. (Neither would Jane Eyre ...) The mother had to die so that the girl started in a place of desperation.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document.” (Tuesday: the opening reception) Neat image.
• “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. totally different jobs, but ... they're both in waste management.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “The professor is always tempted to say something wise that will get the student to reflect on their own words.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Don't even bother telling me you have plans, because I know you are planning on being dead right now.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Bridesmaids need the same kinds of stories soldiers do, stories that justify why they do what they do.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “They are a classic older man and younger woman combo. Gary is the stage and Lila is the song.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “I'm not a monster, Phoebe. I would care if a woman died at my wedding. I have feelings.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “If everybody in my life is always telling me I can be anyone I want, but then whenever I do one thing they don't like, they act like I ruined myself.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Her face is too stiff, the way people's faces look when their abs are slightly clenched.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I’m like Rapunzel. Except nobody wants to abduct me.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Do you know what a talker Lila really is? ... As a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn't make you a better woman. Only losing them does.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “We’ve only been sexting since Tuesday and I've already run out of ways to describe my vagina.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “You are a thousand different people orbiting around a pole. ... Aren't we all that pole? ... Though sometimes I'm not sure there is even a pole.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I don't think about what I want. I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It's your job to take care of yourself like that.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “That's the point of art, isn't it? ... Artists look at the world and see opportunities for creating meaning.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Good writing is driven by a question ... And the essay is the writer's best attempt at answering that question.” (Friday, the Blending of the Families.)
• “How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)
• “To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)

August 2026

First published in the USA by Henry Holt in 2024

My paperback edition was issued by Phoenix Books in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Land in Winter" by Andrew Miller

Set in Devon in the great winter of 1962-3, when many villages were cut off from the world by blizzards and snow-drifts, when trains were forced to abandon journeys, when the sea off the Kent coast had pack ice and some of the upper reaches of the Thames froze, this is a historical novel. It focuses principally on four characters: Eric, a GP who is having an affair with one of his patients, and his pregnant wife Irene, and Bill, a novice dairy farmer and his pregnant wife Rita, a former show girl in a nightclub who has a passion for science fiction and hears voices in her head. The story is told, in the past tense (with the occasional flash forward into the future), from the perspective of each of these characters.

As someone who remembers that winter, I am not sure that historical fiction ought to be set within living memory. It made for an interesting experience. I remember the milkman bring the milk on a sledge!

It starts from the PoV of another person, a patient in the local asylum, who finds the dead body of another patient, who suicide has been facilitated by the unusually large quantity of drugs prescribed by Dr Eric. It ends with total weirdness: a descent into madness or a strange occurrence which might have been foreshadowed by the following lines: “At the edge of the field, by the shadow-line of the hedge, a dog, or something like a dog, raised its head into the light, studied them a moment, the two women upright in the field, then dropped out of sight again, soundlessly.” (Part Two: Saturday, 5th January)

In fact many of the characters' thoughts hover on the cusp of the bizarre:

• “The time? He sifted it from the air, from the many small clues it gave.” (1.1)
• “Time would level it out, for that, he had learned (quite recently), was what time did.” (1.2)
• “This was something else she had learned, that drop into the fever of not knowing, except it’s not confusion exactly, more a case of one part of you not yet ready to accept what the other part knowns perfectly well.” (1.3)
• “She imagined the bull in his pen, the night moving like a river through the big sack of his head. The world, the fog world in its brittle glass sheath of now, was aching for an arrival. Stare long enough, hard enough, and it might be happening already.” (1.10)
• “Each secret meeting tied another thread and tautened the ones already there.” (14th December 1962; 1)
• “He thought of the expression ‘to collect oneself’, of what it meant and how it might be done.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “My mind, thought Bill, is like a fly in a matchbox.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “The dexamyl was starting to work, the first threads. For a few hours the voices would lie on their backs, frozen, beaks wide but silent.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “The other's body, with its lumps and strappings, its terrible softness, was an animal you meet in a dream and must placate with songs and silences; a wicked witch who turns out to be a middle aged woman with poor circulation and some unsheddable grief you are free to look away from.” (Part Two:Saturday 12th January)

I suspect that the theme of families being isolated by the world is a metaphor for the lockdown imposed by the Covid pandemic, which must have been around the time that Miller was writing the novel.

It is one of those novels that take a long time to get going. We are half way through before the snow descends. But this means that it can establish its characters thoroughly in their complexity and with all their background. These feel like real people! And that in turn means that when they think strange thoughts, the reader accepts them. In the second half of the novel, things, even violent things, happen and again, because the build-up had been so painstaking, they do not seem forced or jolt the reader from the suspension of disbelief. Even the final chapter can be credited, although different readers will develop different interpretations. 

There are also some deft touches, such as when Eric draws the sheet over his face, mirroring his action  when his father died ... in the same bed. Beautiful mirroring! This care with the brush strokes suggest an author at his most skilled. 

In 2025, the novel won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Selected quotes:

• “The wireless, lost between stations, hissed like escaping gas then suddenly spoke, posing a question in a language he did not know.” (1.1)
• “In retrospect he seemed, like most of the other masters, a man in despair, who gave expression to it - got some relief from it - by being violent towards children.” (1.4)
• “His wellingtons ... were spotless, and one imagined them to have their own faint pattern of pinstripe.” (1.8)
• “It was a child's bed - she was too big for it, an imposter, an alien.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)

August 2026; 371 pages

First published by Sceptre in 2024

My paperback edition was issued in 2025

Andrew Miller has written a number of novels including Pure, also historical fiction, which I reviewed in 2012.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Scotland's Merlin" by Tim Clarkson

Clarkson, an "independent researcher and historian", claims that the figure of Merlin, the wizard in the Arthurian legends, may in part have been based upon a man called Lailoken.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote Historia Regum Britanniae, the best-selling (there are still over 200 extant manuscripts of this work written c 1136), work which popularised the legends of King Arthur and introduced 'Merlin' to the Arthurian court, also wrote a later work Vita Merlini in which the subject of the biography was involved in a battle, on the side led by Peredur K of Gwynedd, allied with Rodarch, k of Cambrians against Guennolous, K of Scottish forces. He went bonkers following the battle, seeking solitude in the forest. When discovered he was made captive by Rodarch. Here he noticed that the King’s wife had a leaf in her hair and correctly deduced that she had been committing adultery. This got him returned to the forest. Geoffrey also says that Merlin came from Carmarthen.

The Black Book of Carmarthen, compiled c1250, includes poems by a first person narrato called Myrddin) without trappings of Arthuriana but mentioning a battle in which he fought at Arfderydd in northern Britain and subsequent flight in madness to Coed Celyddon; the forest of Celyddon. One of his prophecies concerns a battle fought in 1198 and therefore it can be concluded that the poem was composed after that.

So the hypothesis is that there was a chap called Myrddyn whose name Gdeoffrey changed to Merlin possibly to avoid the Norman-French connotation of 'merde' = 'shit'.

These tales about Myrddin/ Merlin seem to echo tales about a chap called Lailoken who fought in a battle fought in a plain between Lidel and Carwannock and then fled into the wilderness. Lailoken foresees a threefold death in which he is stoned by shepherds, falls into a river and is impaled on a stake which keeps his head below water so he drowns. Another theme is that he sees that the King’s wife has a leaf in her hair and correctly deduces she has been committing adultery.

The battle of Ardferydd which is mentioned three times by 'Merlin' in the Black Book of Carmarthen was a historical battle fought in 573. The battlefield has been identified (though this is still under dispute) as near the modern Carwinley, a hamlet at the confluence of the rivers Esk and Liddel.

Rhydderch Hael aka Roderc was a historical character associated with Alt Clut - the Rock of Clyde = Dun Breatann = Fortress of the Britons = Dumbarton. He had a palace at Pernech = Partick where dwells a madman called Laloecen.

So there seems a sufficient number of similarities to dismiss the possibility of coincidence and accept that thesis that Merlin and Lailoken are the same character.

Coincidentally, there is another 'wild man' of the same period, in the Irish chronicles, called Suibhne (pronounced Sweeney). He too went mad and vanished into the woods, wandering naked following a battle. He literally flew from the battlefield. At one point he went to Britain and met another wild man of the woods called Alladhan (is this Lailoken?). The poetry romance that tells this story was used as the basis for some of the poems allegedly spoken by Mad King Sweeney, a character in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds; ‘Swim-Two-Birds is the English version of the name of a ford in the River Shannon that Sweeney allegedly visited.

Like many of the books of this genre, this is liberally padded and the final conclusion has to be that there is too little evidence to be certain whether the tale told is true or false. However, there was sufficient evidence for me to accept the thesis. And I enjoyed the read: the material i much better organised than many similar books and ther author avoids preposterous claims. 

August 2026; 136 pages and three appendices

Published in 2016 by John Donald

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God