Sons and lovers

The troubled and controversial writer D.H. Lawrence who was also misinterpreted as a sexual pervert wrote this fine novel. This novel was partly autobiographical and is majorly about Paul Morel's love for his mother to such an extent that he grapples with his other youthful love affairs. This was the first insinuation of Oedipus Complex by Lawrence's own account: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives."
It seems rather absurd but it is a modern portrayal of Freud's concept of Oedipus complex. Paul's mother Mrs. Morel gradually detaches herself from the passion for his husband after repeated fights and also due to occasional violent behaviour of her husband resisted by the elder son. They separate finally. She gets totally absorbed in the lives of her sons. The elder son William Morel dies early and the heartbroken mother now starts doting on the younger one. Paul Morel grapples with his youthful desires and gets entangled in two failed love affairs- earlier with his childhood sweetheart and a farm girl Miriam and later with a divorced suffragette Clara who fulfils his physical needs. Both these affairs fall apart because Paul Morel is more attached with his mother and discards any other attachment. His mother dies in the end and he is left alone.
A strange but good novel. Paul Morel is a sensitive character who is always troubled with himself and appears detached to others. After his mother's death his tragedy is decribed thus in the novel:

"When he turned away he felt the last hold for him had gone. The town,
as he sat upon the car, stretched away over the bay of railway, a
level fume of lights. Beyond the town the country, little smouldering
spots for more towns--the sea--the night--on and on! And he had no
place in it! Whatever spot he stood on, there he stood alone.
From his breast, from his mouth, sprang the endless space, and it
was there behind him, everywhere. The people hurrying along the
streets offered no obstruction to the void in which he found himself.
They were small shadows whose footsteps and voices could be heard,
but in each of them the same night, the same silence. He got off
the car. In the country all was dead still. Little stars shone high up;
little stars spread far away in the flood-waters, a firmament below.
Everywhere the vastness and terror of the immense night which is
roused and stirred for a brief while by the day, but which returns,
and will remain at last eternal, holding everything in its silence
and its living gloom. There was no Time, only Space. Who could say
his mother had lived and did not live? She had been in one place,
and was in another; that was all. And his soul could not leave her,
wherever she was. Now she was gone abroad into the night, and he
was with her still. They were together. But yet there was his body,
his chest, that leaned against the stile, his hands on the wooden bar.
They seemed something. Where was he?--one tiny upright speck of flesh,
less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it.
On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny
a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not
be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out,
beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning
round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a
darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted.
So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness,
and yet not nothing.

"Mother!" he whispered--"mother!"

She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this.
And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him,
have him alongside with her.

But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked
towards the city's gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut,
his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the
darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming,
glowing town, quickly."

A nice novel.