Kangaroo (the novel) is a strange beast

I have just ploughed my way through D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, a novel of his that I had never even heard of, let alone read. And I won't pretend it was easy going, nor particularly enjoyable, for that matter.
The first half of the 400-page book, apparently written in just five hectic weeks in 1923, follows the antipodean travels of a disenchanted Englishman and his wife in the aftermath of the First World War, thinly-disguised stand-ins for Lawrence himself and his partner Frieda. It is a kind of travelogue of his initial impressions of Australia, and his half-hearted involvement with the nationalist Diggers movement (and their semi-fictional charismatic leader, "Kangaroo"), as well as with the home-grown Australian socialist movement and its leader, Willie Struthers. There is also a random flashback chapter detailing Lawrence's difficult experiences during the war as a conscientious objector living with a German-born lover.
There are the occasional florid, lyrical descriptive passages, but all too few. In the main it consists of unadorned, workaday description, and unpretentious, basic dialogue, except for the rather excessive (and unconvincing) flights of fancy that the larger-than-life Kangaroo character indulges in:

"I can fight them with their own weapons: the hard mandibles and the acid sting of the cold ant. But that is not how I fight them. I fight them with the warm heart. Deep calls to deep, and fire calls out fire. And for warmth, for the fire of sympathy, to burn out the ant-heap with the heat of fiery, living hearts: that is what I stand for."

But then the book takes a left turn into passages of convoluted, extended metaphors, and obscure metaphysical and philosophical ramblings for several chapters, with only the occasional tepid return to the putative plot-line. And when I say "obscure" and "ramblings", try:

"Man's isolation was always a supreme truth and fact, not to be foresworn. And the mystery of apartness. And the greater mystery of the dark God beyond a man, the God that gives a man passion, and the dark, unexplained blood-tenderness that is deeper than love, but so much more obscure, impersonal, and the brave, silent blood-pride, knowing his own separateness, and the sword-strength of his derivation from the dark God. This dark, passionate religiousness and inward sense of an inwelling magnificence, direct flow from the unknowable God, this filled Richard's heart first, and human love seemed such a fighting for candle-light, when the dark is so much better."

Wha'.. ? Now, I'm no philospher, no intellectual, but that just sounds like drivel to me. And there is page after page of this stuff.
So, not an easy read, not an enjoyable read. And that's to say nothing of the incredible racism, chauvinism and misogyny, which could most charitably be described as a product of the age. You can certainly see why Kangaroo is not among Lawrence's more popular or well-regarded books.