The thing is, the book actually is a great story about class warfare in England between the two World Wars. It takes a look at what war does to indivuduals (Lady Chatterly's husband is a prime example) as well at the views between the upper classes and the lower classes (again, her husband is a prime example -- he cannot comprehend 'they' have feelings). Normally, I don't like books dealing with wealth and poverty, but this book doesn't automatically paint all rich people as evil and all poor people as good, so it didn't bother me. Lady Chatterly simply ignores class distintion. Perhaps because this takes place in Britian eighty or so years ago, the nature of the book doesn't bother me.
The basic storyline is this -- Lord and Lady Chatterly marry are married about a month before WWI. He leaves for the war and is injured, so that he's paralzyed from the waist down. Naturally, this means that Lady Chatterly becomes 'a married nun', which she does for several years, closing herself up. Eventually, Lord Chatterly jokes about how his disability shouldn't stop her from having fun, so Lady Chatterly takes up a lower -- the gamekeeper Parkin. She slowly realizes that while Lord Chatterly is never physically abusive, he does have a mental hold around her.
Lawrence is one of the few male writers that understand the female mind -- which is probably why I found this book so impressive. It manages to have an elegant style and beautiful descriptions of the countryside without ever bogging down in details (amazing for a British writer).
Just an example of the book's beautiful imagery. The novel takes a look at view that the soul is driven by two horses -- the savage black horse, and the delicate white horse. both Lady Chatterly and her husband think their black horses are dead. In reality, Lord Chatterly's lustful black horse has turned to viciousness (he takes pleasure in shooting the rabbits and birds more than he did before the war).
Quote: "You would say the black horse has the right to all his desires?" he asked. "Well, wouldn't you? Only at the right time, and in the right order. Don't you think, instead of the white horse and the driver both struggling to thwart the black one, they should say to him: Gently! Gently! Go gently, abd we'll go with you! Go quietly, without overturning the chariot, and we'll drive right in to the place you want...Either the black horse has a perfect right to his own existance and his own desire or gratification, or he shouldn't exist. And you say yourself, you feel you can't get through with a one-horse team. You are terrified if you think your black horse is dead. Yet you only want him to live, so that you can thwart him."
The other werid thing about this book is Lawrence wrote about three or four versions (due to some editing, maybe the publishers thought the first draft to dangerous to publish or something). So this is all in the first draft. The second one is a lot more detailed, which I like, but it's lacking in the atmosphere of the first version.
"You're either lying or stupid." "I'm stupid! I'm stupid!" Megatron and Starscream
