The Boy in the Bush

D.H. Lawrence & M.L. Skinner The Boy in the Bush (1924)
Mollie Skinner ran a guesthouse in Darlington, Western Australia at which Dave and Frieda stayed. She'd published a couple of books and Lawrence took an interest in her novel The House of Ellis which was then a work in progress. After leaving Australia, he corresponded with Skinner and offered to rewrite The House of Ellis so that it might be published as a collaborative effort, albeit as The Boy in the Bush. It's the story of Jack who arrives in Australia, fresh from England, and views the country through his eyes as he tries to make his way, thus echoing Lawrence's recent experience and allowing him the opportunity to map what he saw as Australia's spiritual dimension.

Unfortunately, if Lawrence rewrote Skinner's prose, it doesn't really show, perhaps testifying to that maxim about the futility of attempting to polish a turd. His own prose on the other hand sticks out a mile, concentrating as it does on the psychic disposition of his characters and their setting, and it's mostly powerful stuff which foreshadows the blood consciousness of The Plumed Serpent to a considerable degree; but these passages form remote islands divided by page after page of Skinner writing something which reminds me a lot of [sentimental garbage written by one of my wife's relatives who will not be identified here for obvious reasons] - coming, going, people eating dinner, other people asking whether they've eaten dinner, ranching, and so on; and I tried but it's barely readable, not grammatically incorrect, just tedious and repetitive. After two or three chapters I was reduced to skimming, which was actually fairly easy, Lawrence's text tending to take the form of lengthy, ponderous paragraphs as distinct from Skinner's endless chit chat. One day someone will isolate just Dave's material to form a decent if slightly disjointed novella, but until then The Boy in the Bush does very little to reward the effort of trawling through for the passages which are worth reading.