Kangaroo
Kangaroo ( 1923 ),a novel by D. H. Lawrence , based on the Lawrences' visit to Australia in 1922 .
Richard Lovat Somers , a writer, and his wife Harriet are in Sydney for an indefinite period. Through their neighbour Jack Calcott , Somers makes the acquaintance of ‘Kangaroo’ Ben Cooley , a Jewish barrister involved in radical politics. He tries to enlist Somers's sympathy for his programme, but fails, and the novel ends with his death after a violent Labour meeting at Canberra Hall (at which Calcott claimed to have killed a demonstrator) and the departure of the Somers for America. The book mingles political outbursts and meditations with observant evocation of Australian life and landscape. Chapter 10, ‘The Nightmare’, describes Lawrence's own wartime confrontations with authority in Cornwall and his humiliating examinations, in Bodmin and Derby, for military service. Like Somers, he was rejected as...
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