Kangaroo

Set in post-First World War Australia, Kangaroo follows the English writer Richard Lovat Somers and his wife Harriet as they enter a landscape at once dazzling, estranging, and politically volatile. Lawrence combines autobiographical fiction, modernist psychological inquiry, and political novel, setting lyrical evocations of the Australian coast against tense debates over democracy, nationalism, masculinity, and collective violence. The enigmatic "Kangaroo," a charismatic leader of a quasi-paramilitary movement, becomes the focus of Somers's fascination and resistance. D. H. Lawrence wrote Kangaroo during his self-imposed "savage pilgrimage" away from England, after years of censorship, wartime suspicion, and disillusionment with European society. His 1922 stay in New South Wales supplied the novel's physical setting and emotional atmosphere, while his own marriage, restless exile, and suspicion of mass politics profoundly shape Somers's divided consciousness. Readers interested in Lawrence's major fiction will find Kangaroo indispensable: it is uneven in the most revealing Lawrencean way-passionate, argumentative, visionary, and unsettling. It is especially recommended for those drawn to modernist explorations of place, political temptation, and the solitary conscience under pressure.