Maxine Peake[‘s]… fully vocalized performance, unpretentious, intimate and non-judgmental, is all Lawrence himself could have hoped for from an interpretation of his novel. An outstanding production of a groundbreaking classic.

Naxos, which specialises in exceptional recordings of the English canon, has just issued it as an audiobook, beautifully read by Maxine Peake of Dinnerladies and Shameless. The audio version of perhaps the most controversial novel of the 20th century is a revelation… To Connie, her lover ’seemed so unlike a gamekeeper, so unlike a working man anyhow, although he had something in common with the local people’. Lawrence emphasises this point by the use of dialect, a theme that emerges more explicitly from Maxine Peake’s exemplary reading.

In describing Connie Chatterley’s sensual awakenings in her couplings with Mellors, Lawrence exposes the dry intellectualism and harsh divisions in society represented by paralysed Clifford Chatterley and his milieu. Maxine Peake’s tender and sympathetic reading subtly emphasises Lawrence’s sincerity. He overdoes Connie’s pulsating wombs and bowels at the expense of creating a complete and real person, and he ends the story before Connie and Mellors attempt a surely doomed life together – but the novel’s power cannot be denied.

Sound Commentary Starred Review
Editor’s Pick of the Month
Though no longer the shocker that this sexually explicit novel was when first published in 1928, Chatterley remains uncomfortably forthright about the sexual tensions and emotional ambivalence that define male/female relationships. This is both the source of its power and its very point. For Lawrence has more on his mind than describing the amorous encounters of an unlikely pair of lovers, (a titled young woman and the gamekeeper of her crippled husband’s estate). He takes on mobility among the social classes and the sterility caused by industrialization and materialism. He advocates a return to basics: mutual respect, naturalness of expression, and hands-on human tenderness. In our own alienated age where, thanks to technology, actual contact often seems less sought after than virtual, these themes still resonate strongly, and portions of this novel are almost jarring in their contemporaneity. The novel is preachy. And modern feminists have criticized it for a sensibility they find all too male, particularly in its glorification of motherhood. However, if Lawrence gets some of this matter wrong, he gets a great more right. Naxos AudioBooks hammers that home with its inspired choice of Maxine Peake to perform this work. Her fully vocalized performance, unpretentious, intimate and non-judgmental, is all Lawrence himself could have hoped for from an interpretation of his novel. An outstanding production of a groundbreaking classic.