Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence

How hard is Kangaroo to read?

Kangaroo scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100

Lawrence writes in confident, idiomatic English of the 1920s with a sophisticated but accessible register. Occasional Latin phrases, French song lyrics, and German titles appear alongside Australian colloquialisms ("diggers," "Bully," bungalow names). Words like "proletariat," "categorical," and "hymeneal" surface naturally but are never obscurantist. No invented language or specialized jargon; closer to The Great Gatsby than to Moby-Dick on the vocabulary register.

Sentence structure: 62 out of 100

Lawrence alternates between short, punchy declarative sentences and extended philosophical digressions running several hundred words without paragraph breaks. The "Harriet and Lovat at Sea in Marriage" chapter sustains an elaborate nautical conceit across multiple pages of nested subordinate clauses. The chess scenes and neighborhood dialogue use crisp, spoken rhythms, while the Nightmare and Revenge chapters shift into unbroken essayistic prose. More demanding than Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but far from Faulkner's 1,000-word sentences.

Abstraction: 72 out of 100

The novel divides roughly equally between vivid concrete scene — haggling with taxi drivers, setting rat-traps, cleaning a beach bungalow — and sustained philosophical argument about democracy, authority, love, and what Lawrence calls the "dark god." Entire chapters abandon narrative for political monologue, as when Somers meditates on dead ideals and the inevitability of revenge. The abstraction is not the compressed symbolism of The Waste Land but the explicit discursiveness of a novelist-philosopher working through ideas in real time.

Information density: 64 out of 100

Every chapter carries several simultaneous registers: social comedy of colonial manners, political argument about democracy and authority, psychological observation of male bonding, and metaphysical speculation about place and selfhood. The digger-club conspiracy, three competing ideological systems (Kangaroo's love-power, Struthers' socialism, Somers' dark god), and the marriage debate run concurrently without resolution. The fragmentary Bits chapter offers a different kind of density through anecdote accumulation. Above average but not overwhelming.

Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100

Somers is a transparent Lawrence self-portrait — something Lawrence acknowledges in the text itself, breaking the fourth wall to question whether a poet's fine feelings deserve attention. The narration slides between third-person observation and first-person essayistic intrusion without warning. Readers must understand that Somers's ideas are Lawrence's ideas held up for dramatization and partial critique, while Harriet's persistent deflations function as authorial self-correction. Moderate indirection rather than radical unreliability.

Symbolic density: 62 out of 100

Australia itself operates as symbol — a spiritual vacuum and primal promise simultaneously — and the kangaroo/Kangaroo naming duality is structurally pointed. The bush carries recurring spiritual menace from the opening West Australian moonlit walk. Lawrence's "dark god" is a theological-metaphorical construct pressed repeatedly into service. Yet the novel explains its own symbols at length rather than leaving them as pure resonance; the density is below Woolf or Moby-Dick, which trust readers to infer.

Ironic distance: 42 out of 100

Lawrence is substantially earnest — this is a dramatized philosophical essay, not a satire. The comedy of colonial manners (chess games, bungalow names, dahlia-exchanging neighbors) provides gentle irony, and Harriet's pointed deflations of Somers's grandiosity create moments of self-aware comedy. But there is no sustained gap between author intention and textual surface of the kind found in Lolita or The Sellout. Lawrence means what Somers says, even when he puts it in Harriet's mouth to say he is wrong.

Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100

Kangaroo dies, the digger movement collapses, and Somers refuses all three competing ideological offers — love-power, socialism, and his own "dark god" vision. The novel ends with departure from Australia without any political or spiritual synthesis. Somers explicitly states that he wants only to be clear of humanity. The marriage plot achieves no resolution either, just the continuation of impasse at sea. The ending is quietly open rather than closed: "Adieu Australia" is farewell, not answer.

Structural complexity: 55 out of 100

The novel is broadly chronological but includes the anomalous Nightmare chapter — pure autobiographical flashback to wartime Cornwall with a completely different register, no Australian characters, and no pretense of fiction. The marriage-as-voyage chapter abandons all narrative for sustained extended metaphor. The Bits chapter is frankly fragmentary. These formal violations are less experimental than Ulysses or Flights but more disruptive than anything in War and Peace, creating a structure that feels like a novel arguing with itself about what kind of novel it is.

How Kangaroo is regarded

Kangaroo holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

D.H. Lawrence