Mr Noon

"It is. That is partly to do with timing. It was not published until 1984, and so was too late to be included in what people think of as the Lawrentian canon. Yet it is one of Lawrence’s funniest books. I think the charge that Lawrence has no sense of humour is simply bewildering. But it can feel absurd to insist that somebody has a sense of humour. In a way, if someone does not find something funny, then this can’t be argued. However, before dismissing Lawrence as having no sense of humour, one should at least have read Mr Noon . The narrator is blustering and bullying. You feel like you are being frog-marched about, but in a way that is highly comic and enjoyable. Another thing I like about this book is that it is utterly without form. It comprises two halves, and remains unfinished. The first half is set in Eastwood (where Lawrence grew up), and is a comic study of sexual mores among mining people. “Gilbert Noon effectively becomes D H Lawrence” And then you turn a page and there is a new heading and suddenly you find yourself in Bavaria. Our hero has left home behind him—as of course Lawrence did—and from now on Gilbert Noon effectively becomes D H Lawrence. The novel almost morphs into a diary of Lawrence’s early time with Frieda. He gets his protagonists over the Alps, and then stops. That ending is in itself interesting. Maybe he had reached the present, or at least too close for him to write about. Maybe he is not really sure where this and his own narrative are going, or he senses that this novel will never have a readership (and indeed it did not, within his lifetime). He makes an utter mess of the whole thing. This is one of the things to which I am attracted in Lawrence. In striking contrast to T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, Lawrence was not intensely and ambitiously concerned with artistry. The pressures of his life created this mess of a work. One hesitates even to call it a novel. It is the production of work under the pressure of life, that I love in Lawrence. That is right. More generally, Lawrence was fiercely opposed to English or British parochialism. The Rainbow opens with a wonderful depiction of a traditional English society rooted in a part of the Midlands countryside that has been there, as it were, forever. The plot of the novel happens because something enters that world to change it and broaden it. A Polish woman bizarrely turns up in a Midlands village. With the entry of the foreign, a novel can start happening. Lawrence himself spent as much time as possible outside England. He travelled the world in a way that few people, including writers, in his own time did. He was restless to know of other societies. By the standards of his time, he was anti-racist. It is not that he did not believe in races, but he thought, for example, that the Europeans were on the decline, and that the Mexicans, North Americans and Russians might be on the rise. His awareness of the narrowness and limitations of his own country might be taken as an antidote to a kind of insular thinking that is prevalent today."