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Lady Chatterley, the quintessential cheater, more notorious a tragic figure even than Madame Bovary, is at the center of a story that both rouses and irritates me. Written in a time when sex was for young people and married couples and intellectualism ran wild, Lady C, as the author was wont to call it, told a story of romantic love that heals and inspires.

Lady Chatterley has four lovers altogether. One is of her youth; young, eager, appreciative, but set apart from the care and devotion that often grows from carnal engagements. He and she teach each other of sex separate from thoughtful care, though it does sound like an adventure and if she had had the chance she might have found love without heartache first. Her second lover is her husband. They have a short time together before he goes to fight in the Great War and when he comes back he is paralyzed below the waist. For the next ten years, she lives with him and cares for him, but his overly cerebral analysis and his empty but popular writings slowly, slowly drive her towards the arms of a young playwright, her third lover. He is young and frantic, passionate with a baseline of bitter resentment. He once angrily scolds her for bringing herself to orgasm, petulantly whining that no woman ever came at the same time he did (and not surprising, with only two minutes to work with). Her third lover is the woodsman, the gamekeeper her husband hired without care but casually, thinking of the decision as his hereditary right to the lives of the lower classes. Finally, Lady Chatterley discovers a man of endurance and variety that brings her the kind of long-term satisfaction a thoroughly fucked woman possesses.

Through each adventure, the author uses monologue and long form prose to outline his own ideals. Monologues delivered by windy intellectuals make it clear that Lawrence doesn’t believe in life without sex because their long discourses praising the mental life as superior to the physical are punctuated by Lady Chatterly’s internal skepticism. Long form prose, very poetic and descriptive but with a strange habit of repetition, illustrate the high esteem Lawrence holds the feminine and sensual sex. I can see why, in 1928, this book was considered pornographic: Lawrence uses strong and transparent language to describe our Lady’s various lovemakings and hold up sexual passion as a form of healing. To me, now, in my circumstance and in today’s sexual climate, I felt only moments of surprise as opposed to the appall and disgust that must have followed in the postwar, puritanical social climate.

The books ends without really ending so we don’t know what happens to the Lady but there are some interesting things that jumped out at me. The irritating one is that it’s obviously written by a man who has no idea what being a woman is like and failed to consult any in the writing of this novel. He often refers to ‘her woman’s instinct’ and ‘her womanly senses’ and all sorts of things that are universal to humans but are written as the sole property of women. I found my eyes rolling regularly as I came across silly passages like that where he wrote her behavior as if it’s just what women do and she as a person had nothing to do with it or as if women have some kind of special powers or some foolishness. It felt to me as if I were reading what someone wished were true and in that way it very much was a romance novel.

I also noticed that the Lady’s husband was incredibly progressive, granting her license to take discreet lovers and even to have a child by someone since he was unable to. I find his actions admirable, if the reasoning behind them a little flimsy. He and his intellectual friends don’t value the pleasures of the flesh and so he doesn’t realize what she is missing. My partner has noticed that if we go longer than four or five days without sex, I get emotional, irrational, and weepy. She went nearly ten years! and he didn’t even notice. Of course he allows her her affairs, not because he realizes how important it is but because he doesn’t believe it important at all. What a dope.

The final take-away, and one that I am pleased with, is the idea that sexual passion is important for our emotional and even physical health. In her years between the playwright and the woodsman, she begins to waste away, lose her appetite, become listless and gray, and generally suffer neglect and ennui. Her health recovers rapidly as she moves into her affair and it sounds like the sex is great, if a little romanticized. While fanciful in this story, the idea that sexual health is important to overall health is one I heartily stand by. I like to joke that I’m doing my part to prevent prostate cancer by ensuring regular activity, and getting your heart rate up a bit isn’t a bad thing 😉

Overall, I found it sweet in some ways, silly and overly poetic in others, and not as much a pleasure to read as the Outlander novels I also took with me. I would be curious to read a modern rewrite, using more common language and pacing more evenly. While I didn’t respond with any strong emotions, I will say that the mild romantic reaction it did provoke was well timed. Reading it with the sun and later the stars drifting overhead, the twitter of birds in the trees and the occasional swish of a single car on the lonely road the only reminder of civilization, my inclination towards amour rose luxuriously. Reading about how a sexual connection had the power to energize, educate, demoralize, please, or anger, and in explicit, sometimes even playful terms I was grateful for the proximity of a willing partner and the privacy of a closed door. I can see why, when video based pornography and more explicit writings weren’t available, this book titillated and aroused many of its readers in a relatively healthy and comfortable way.

As you well know, I love science fiction because it posits bizarre but universal circumstances and watches humanity respond. Orson Scott Card asks how we would respond to an inscrutable alien race. Ursula K LeGuin asks what we would do in response to gender imbalances and another messiah figure. Hoyle and Elliot ask what we would do when given a gift that seems too good to be true.

The book is slow to begin but short. A long afternoon is plenty of time to follow Dr. Fleming, brilliant astronomer and computer genius, as he discovers a signal from the Andromeda galaxy, interprets it, and comes to deal with the results. The signal codes for a computer faster and more complex than anything dreamt of at the time (written in the 60’s, set in the 70’s) and a program to feed into the computer. While Dr. Fleming and his team work to build and run this supercomputer, political forces push and pull and Fleming himself begins to suspect that this gift has strings attached. The computer begins to learn about humans and prompt them to experiment, eventually resulting in the creation of Andromeda, the beautiful young woman who may be the salvation of humanity or its destruction. Through it all, Dr. Fleming fights with himself, his friends and colleagues, and the powers that be, trying to learn the truth and prevent eventual disaster.

While the book is an easy read, it is not particularly action packed or fast paced or detailed. Character development is left to the reader to infer as large blocks of time pass with only a few sentences to mark them. I would have enjoyed more details in general because I love the act of creating images in my mind that reflect the action. I feel so much more involved in books that give me more to work with. That being said, I think the authors, one of whom is a professor, expect a certain amount of autonomy in their readers. It’s as if they gave me what I needed to craft the story and left the details for me to fill in. The details that are there are creative and interesting. They describe one man’s voice as ‘whinnying’ and Andromeda is described as blonde, with high cheekbones and very baltic looking. I’ve never seen that descriptor but I imagine that the readers of the 60’s did. It is clear that the authors are scientists and academics as the villains of the book are of course the government and the military while the scientists are the last line of defense in a war no one knows is on.

The interesting scenario is this: the computer Fleming creates and the woman it designs present a cheat for the British government. With her ability to communicate directly with the device and with its vastly superior problem solving ability, the government has a quick fix for medicine, agriculture, economics, and defense. However, it is alien technology which Fleming suspects has an ulterior motive. It is almost inevitable that the bureaucratic powers attempt to monopolize the advantages and trivialize the dangers of this new technology, even after several ‘accidental’ deaths by electrocution.

By creating a beautiful woman to act as its liaison, the machine takes advantage of gender dynamics to disarm the overwhelmingly male authority figures. While raising awareness about gender stereotypes was likely not the primary goal when writing this book, the fact that the authors chose to use a female character to serve as the ‘slave’ of the computer illuminates a deep seated perspective of women as subservient and sexual to the exclusion of individual personality. One of the politicians licks his lips when looking at her inert body during its development and our protagonist uses kissing and caressing to try to show her what it’s like to be human. These acts make sense in context and are extremely likely under the circumstances, but that’s part of why this choice raises the issue of women in storytelling. It’s supposed to show how bad the nasty politicians are and how achingly human Fleming can be but it feels cliche in what was otherwise nontraditional story telling. Add to that the fact that Andromeda loses her life only hours after she gains freedom from the machine and we see a female character who has nothing to offer except as a foil for male characters.

The romance was equally placid. She’s a spy set on him and he’s a big brother type who falls easily in and out of ‘love’. She’s conflicted about her roles and he’s oblivious and childish. Perhaps it’s just human but it’s so far outside my experience that it rings hollow. I almost don’t even remember the love interest because she spent the whole book wringing her hands and trying to get out of her responsibilities.

While I found the book entertaining, it is also jolting; plodding and skipping ahead by turns. The first half of the book is about Fleming discovering the message, decoding it, getting excited, getting dejected and playing around with boats and fast cars like a teen hit hard with affluenza, getting passionate, getting apathetic, and eventually getting his way but not really. I love the idea of finding, creating, and figuring out a trojan horse from outer space, but I feel like a rewrite could make so much more from this concept. The writers are obviously intelligent, but so much is missing that it feel less than a news story. It could have been a short story and had a greater impact while taking less time to write or read. It is a good idea and the writers are obviously intelligent, but perhaps I’ve been spoiled by detailed writing that paints rich images in my mind and find a book that relies on me to fill in the gaps too abrupt to enjoy in retrospect. While reading it it was great but I’m already prepared to move on.