I remember the 1960 obscenity trial very clearly. My mother bought a copy of the book of the moment and carried it about in a brown paper bag so that we wouldn’t know she’d got it. Do parents still underestimate their children’s awareness so naively, I wonder? Of course I knew where she kept it and gleefully read it then – and understood very little of it except for gasping in amazement at seeing in print, words I’d hitherto heard only in the playground from boys showing off.

I’ve read it several times since but never before with the warm enjoyment and empathy I felt this time. When I reached the final page I actually sighed with regret. “Connie, I shall miss you” I thought. “You too, Oliver”. My old paperback copy, incidentally, fell apart when I took if off the shelf so I had to buy a new one for this re-read.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was DH Lawrence’s last novel. He published it in privately in Florence in 1928 and it sold well so that for the last couple of years of his life he had a bit of the financial security he’d almost never known before. By then he was already sexually impotent owing to the tuberculosis which killed him in 1930, aged 46,  and his volatile, highly sexed wife, Freda had long sought her pleasures elsewhere. So although little seems to have been made of this, I reckon personal experience probably informed his depiction of Clifford Chatterley, paralysed by a war injury.

The plot is simple. Connie, Lady Chatterley, falls in love with her husband’s gamekeeper, becomes pregnant and eventually plans a future with him once they have both divorced. Lawrence – unlike rigidly moralistic Tolstoy whose Anna  (Anna Karenina, 1878)  has to die under the famous train because she is an adultress – allows his pair a hopeful ending.

The sex is as explicit as anything written since – and that, obviously, was the issue. When Penguin Books published it in paperback in 1960 they knew there would be a trial but they also knew that for someone as respected as Lawrence they could line up some big names for the defence: John Mortimer and Rebecca West, for instance, along with clergy, academics etc and win the case, thereby clearing the way for freedom of expression in other books. And that is exactly what happened.

It is actually a book of great lyrical beauty and truth. It’s worth reading for page 144 alone – the most accurate description of female orgasm I have ever read. Goodness knows how Lawrence knew. (Needless to say I didn’t notice this when I first toiled, in a very juvenile way, through the novel everyone was talking about.) Mellors falls in love with Connie and she with him because they’re equals and they’re honest with each other about sex and their feelings, both physical and emotional, and I really like that. Mellors eschews what he calls “false sugaries”. I’d remembered that he speaks to her, at intimate moments in broad Derby   “caressive dialect.” I had forgotten that he is actually a drop-out, a grammar school boy, who’d been commissioned during the war and normally uses received pronunciation. Connie’s sister, Hilda, who is very cross about the affair tells Mellors that his dialect use is “affected.”

It’s easy to scoff at Lawrence’s lexical tics. Once you’ve noticed his prediliction for “loins” and “thighs” it becomes a minor irritant but for the most part he writes beautifully: “But Clifford’s voice went on, clapping and gurgling with unusual sounds” we’re told as he reads Racine to his wife.  Or: “To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn out and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills”.

DH Lawrence is currently out of fashion. He shouldn’t be.

Even the title is clever – the deliberate omission of a question mark makes it ambivalent. It could be a question about intent or it could be a subjunctive statement meaning “If we should stay …” and therefore speculative in the what-would-happen-if sense. Oh the joys of this gloriously flexible language of ours.

Kay, a  nurse, and Cyril, her GP husband have been happily married and settled in Lambeth for a long time. Nursing her father through the graphically physical awfulness of Alzheimer’s has the effect on Kay it does on many of us. She recoils in horror at how the same fate could await her. After her father’s death in 1991 she and Cyril – it’s his idea – agree that once they are both 80, regardless of their state of health, they will overdose on the Seconal which Cyril has stashed in the fridge thereby sparing themselves a hideous demise. The agreed date arrives shortly after Brexit and in the midst of the Covid pandemic.

So what happens? That is entirely up to you, dear reader. Forget that omniscient author that A Level English teachers bang on about. This one is gleefully unreliable.  Maybe Kay takes the pills and Cyril bottles out. Or perhaps they’re caught just before the deed and sectioned by their children. Maybe neither of them do it and they enjoy many more years of healthy productive life. On the other hand perhaps medical science comes up with an unexpected world changer. Anything can happen because Shriver tells a whole string of versions of this story, repeatedly winding back and then making different things happen. Thus the cleverest post-modern novel I’ve read since The French Lieutenant’s Woman forces you to be an active reader and choose your own outcome. She visits a whole range of fictional worlds too – like variations on a theme in music.  She often reminds me of John Fowles. Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury are clearly in the mix too because some of her scenarios take us well into the 21^st century when things might be healthy, peaceful and prosperous. Or they might not. Is money really just an abstract concept? Would we really want to live for ever even if we could? And surely it really is time to think rationally about assisted dying?

There’s nothing obscure about any of this. It’s a very accessible read and often laugh-aloud funny. Shriver’s wry, taut writing style in more honed than ever in this novel. I shall long treasure, for example, Kay’s sardonic observation that “Simon and Hayley rang to wish her a ‘safe’ birthday – safety having been mysteriously elevated of late to the highest of virtues.” And at one point she pillories herself as “that Shriver woman”  an irritant that her characters hear on the radio.

Many of the books I discuss here are re-reads of books I’ve known for a long time. Should We Stay or Should We Go is a 2021 publication which I felt compelled to share because it’s one of the most original new novels I’ve read in quite a while.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence

People who read fiction know things. I used to tell my students that so often that they probably mouthed it behind my back in mockery. But of course I was right. Fiction is an indispensable fount of general knowledge. And Ashes of London (2016) is a good example.

Yes, of course, I learned in primary school that the Great Fire of London was in 1666. And I was taken to the Monument and told stories about a baker in Pudding Lane.  But, despite later reading Pepys and Evelyn I had never actually thought much about what it would have been like at the time to be on the ground in London surrounded by ash, dangerous buildings, people sheltering in cellars, the fate of the old St Paul’s in the balance (rebuild or renovate?) and a lot of people drawing up plans and vying for contracts. Neither – what an admission! –  had I given any serious thought to the Fire in relation to the Restoration only six years earlier and the death of Cromwell only eight years before.

Andrew Taylor brings all that to life in this crime novel, the first of a series featuring Cat Lovett and James Marwood, set at the time of the Fire. You can almost smell the acridity of ashes and hear the creaking of the temporary supports hastily erected to stop more buildings collapsing as his complex web of characters skirt round, and confront each other, at a time when nobody is quite sure where other people’s loyalties lie. Yes, an Act of Indemnity protects most people from being prosecuted for supporting The Commonwealth but not if you were a regicide. And Charles 1’s execution in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1649 is only 17 years ago. James Marwood vividly remembers being taken to see it as a child by his printer father, a Commonwealth supporter who now has dementia.

Cat Lovett is also the child of a wanted man, portrayed as well- meaning, passionate – blinded by religion – and flawed. Cat, who hasn’t seen her father for a long time, goes into hiding at the beginning of the novel because, living with an aunt, she is raped by her cousin and maims him in retaliation. She is a refreshingly feisty character. This is not the only time she behaves incisively – and that’s a literal adverb in this context.

St Paul’s cathedral, now a huge, dangerous ruin towers over the action and  it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that the suspenseful denouement takes place at the top of the crumbling tower. It’s really just a question of who is going over. No spoilers.

Action packed, full of colour and history – just the thing for winter evenings as the days shorten.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver