Kangaroo by D H Lawrence

This novel is from 1922 and it reflects the trauma of the time after World War I.

Much of this trauma is personal, within. Big human events can cause questions, wondering, how this can be avoided in the future and how is this global world going to get on. The reverberations of the war are also in the people in one way or another, their movements and desires.

There is a bit of a meandering on the road plot to this novel but it is mainly a 365 page journey into the interior of the Richard character. It’s a story about how to deal with other humans. The plot is not the thing here. There is not much action. It feels like a pre-cinema a world view.

Australia is the setting for a story constructed to explore all this internal work. The character, Kangaroo, is a Australian lawyer. He is also a wannabe dictator who has attracted a band of followers mostly made up veterans from the war in Europe who have not had that type of excitement and bonding since.

A globe hopping English writer Richard and his not English wife Harriet land in Australia and Richard is seduced into this right wing oddball male scene through being rather reluctantly neighborly.

There is also a left wing working class socialist movement.
Yet a lot of the drama is the strange need of this Kangaroo man to be loved and followed. Kangaroo is a nickname for the lawyer leader man. The socialist have a leader too and there is a scene with him trying to recruit Richard as well because he is a writer of some note and renown. But he is nowhere near as grasping, needy, and ultimately grotesquely pathetic as Kangaroo. It shows the sick need if this type of narcissistic political, cult, or personal “leader”.

All this is set up really to look into an individual's place among others personally and politically. It works very well that way. We follow Richard as he is being seduced into “loving” Kangaroo, the fascist impulse stand-in. We feel the writer confronting these ideas within himself. He is a man open to ideas and faces the risk in that, he could be swept away. Fear of that makes him perhaps rigidly noncommittal. Open to ideas but rejecting all action options. Avoiding the associations and actions that can make the idea manifest. The novel is cogitation on these big waves of human political energy building up out of industrialization. Socialism and fascism.

Richard finds himself being pulled by both poles. The minimal suspense of the piece is in which will he choose. It might be useful for the reader to see this in context of 1922, before the triumph of German fascism and the horrible results, into and during WWII. And the Soviet Union was brand new. Everything was new and with a sweepingly rapid industrialization. We are at the edge and near the end of the greater  British Empire but 20th Century was still to come.

Yet Richard doesn’t want to choose, cannot choose. He does not trust this human, male, energy that tries to use grand ideas and romantic sentimentality to change the world. He distrusts this and feels silly when he notes it rising up in himself.

But he wants connection to something. He craves it. He has a sort of idiosyncratic philosophical/spiritual point of view. If he and all could be more attentive to some natural force a god in everything maybe things could somehow set right, otherwise the left and right are two sides of the same thing. It’s not that stark, he does make a stand and chooses a side in a noncommittal way. It would have been disappointing otherwise and he makes the correct choice even if he isn’t exactly joining up. After all few really do.

There is a long illuminating diversion into Richard and Harriet’s experience in England during the war. This reflects the actual war time experience of D H Lawrence. It is the outsider, the objector, dealing with a bonded unified nation’s jingoistic environment. This sort of thing apparently never changes.

On the personal level the novel depicts a lot of loneliness and desire. There is a craving for male bonding. A real love, caring, and trust between males as is available sometimes between men and women.

But Richard can’t  fit himself into any of that as much as he might want it or is interested in it. The whole construction of the settings for this male bonding do not work for him. He is simply not a team player up for any of these surface bonding programs that we make available. He doesn’t want to be touched. Is that because he needs to be touched too much if at all? He sees the limits and social dangers of any variance. It’s as if the an old type of male connection was removed in the construction of the commercial competitive world. The limits set in the bonding environments made available are not removed from the domination of a power hungry dualist world view. The business connections, military connections, sport fan bonding; all have a sort of ritual structure prohibiting spontaneity.

He wants another sort of connection out of his general spiritual outlook. He wants the humans to feel the flow or energy from the earth and reconnect with and through that rather than pretending to be something separate.

And there is really the only small hope for the redemption of humans.

The notion is that this type of bonding could be more open, not so much a dance of the restricted roles of mainstream male bonding. But that hazards opening to territory forbidden wherein, of course, there is some hope and danger.

There is mystery here. His notions are not exactly named. He calls part of it his dark god. But this is unseen and unnameable rather than dark equals evil.

He embraces mystery over knowing, naming, and structure. Yet craves connection to the mysterious structure beyond intellectual and emotional decisions. A surrender that would not have to be made.

Kangaroo offers a transparently artificial option for this. The novel could also be a warning about that type. The power hungry eager to exploit this spirit, hope, love, and our need to belong.

In a way Richard is a sort of fugitive wandering to the next stop in a trip initiated by disgust with his own homeland.

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I have been watching some film adaptations of Lawrence’s work recently. This is the first time I have read him since I was a young man, maybe 40 years ago. I had read The Rainbow back then and remember liking it but not much else about it.
I saw an interesting movie version of Kangaroo that made me read the book which is a lot better of course. The movie is good though.
After reading Kangaroo I read the wiki page on D H Lawrence and also about Australia. The book mentions it being a new nation and that is so have become one in 1901 after being a native homeland and used as a penal colony for a couple hundred years earlier by British colonialist invaders.  
That is where I got that Lawrence was relaying his actual war time struggles in the chapter about that.

Kangaroo feels like real writing to me. Telling the truth from the heart and the brain. It feels open and courageous. I can easily relate to his difficulties with men, and it's perhaps underlying homophobia, or if not phobia, but doubt as to if there is a compartment in which to put that neatly.  And really is there time for more caring? After all we need to make a living etc other than manage relationships. Richard and Harriet are a committed couple disagreements aside. That’s one intense relationship. D H Lawrence left a lot of writing in his short life. He must have had to push people off for that time, maybe it’s not that hard to not choose additional relationship if one is a solitary type to begin with and spend the time thinking and writing about it instead. Writing about wanting it at least is a guarantee of production. A relationship can leave one with nothing to show. Perhaps that is why we we remain disconnected. We need to be productive not just hang out in Eden.

This book was a joy for me to read and I felt a real connection to the main character, the conflicts, and his alienation.