Ladies' night

At a time when D H Lawrence appears almost terminably unfashionable (personally speaking, it's upsetting to see that neither Women In Love nor The Rainbow features in the Book List Challenge meme currently popular on Facebook), perhaps the best thing to say about BBC4's recent Women In Love was that it will hopefully have drawn fresh and renewed attention to his work. It should also have helped to dispel the myth (treated like common knowledge) that Lawrence was a shameless misogynist - that label, foisted upon him by Kate Millett and others, may perhaps hold true for some of the suspect works of the 1920s, but The Rainbow and Women In Love bear valuable testimony to his claim to be writing very much in the service of women.

The two-part series also succeeded with regard to the cinematography. While it was undeniably difficult to stomach at first, self-consciously arty it seemed, the camerawork came to feel more natural and, to an extent, helped to take scenes beyond realism towards impressionism, reflecting the work of Lawrence's frequently dazzling prose.

But there was also plenty that made me gnash my teeth. William Ivory's adaptation was actually a cut-and-shut job on both novels, an awkward surgical procedure that didn't really come off. The conflation meant key scenes were skipped briskly through or over, their full significance barely glimpsed or missed altogether - scenes such as with the rabbit, Birkin's stoning of the moon's reflection or Gudrun paying witness to Birkin's letter being mockingly read out in the Pompadour. (At least Ivory got the climactic chapter 'Death And Love' about right.)

Fair enough, Birkin's simultaneously verbose and inarticulate flights of fancy probably needed to be chopped or at least truncated, but the ruthless boiling-down and modernising of the dialogue wasn't always or even often strictly necessary. While Gerald was arguably the best-drawn character, Birkin came across as something of a pathetic wet fish and Hermione never convinced in her mental and spiritual opposition to and distinction from Birkin and Ursula.

Most unforgivable was Ivory's decision to transplant the later episodes from the Alps to the African desert, which ran sharply counter to the novel's insistent symbolic identification of Gerald with the cold North which eventually claims him. What reason could there genuinely be for this deviation other than that it's indicative of a screenplay writer clumsily putting his own stamp on it? Neither was I impressed that the second part drew to a neat (if unhappy) conclusion with Gerald's death and Ursula comforting Gudrun, thus ignoring the novel's radical open-endedness.

I've no doubt it would be an enormous challenge to do what I would feel as justice to these books, but the fact remains that this adaptation could have been more just.