(I wrote this review before the recent shocking violence in Israel and Gaza, and that’s why it isn’t mentioned.)
One of my favourite books is Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, which was also one of the first adult novels I discovered for myself. I’d loved her children’s books and it was a great step from one world of reading to another. I read the two sequels, but didn’t read all that many of her other novels for a long while – despite buying An End To Running back in 2002. (I should say – I got a bit of déjà vu reading it, but I think that’s because it has similarities to her children’s book One More River.)
This was Lynne Reid Banks’ second novel and there are elements that could remind you of her first. The male lead is a Jewish writer, for instance – but the female protagonist, Martha, is nothing like The L-Shaped Room‘s Jane. Martha is a no-nonsense, articulate, intelligent young woman looking for work as a secretary – preferably something literature-adjacent. As the novel opens, she is being interviewed for a job with Aaron Franks. She instantly dislikes him. He has a cruelty to his demeanour and a self-importance as a writer that comes across as childishly arrogant. But he is supported in this by his sister – the real power behind the throne – who believes Aaron to be a genius, and takes against Martha immediately.
Martha is offered the job, and takes it because she needs the money – and because she is undeniably intrigued by this man. She thinks the writing his sister most prizes is pretentious, meaningless waffle – but there is a novel about his father’s experience as a Jewish immigrant that seems clearer and deeper. In all honesty, Banks takes us from their initial mistrust and disdain for each other to a friendship rather quickly and slightly unconvincingly, but perhaps it is necessary for the plot.
Somewhere along the way, Aaron comes up with a ‘brilliant’ idea. Sick of his sister’s bullying and misguided views on literature, he decides to write a play entirely in the style that she likes. It is meaningless nonsense, and Banks clearly enjoys giving us excerpts from it. And it is an admirable pastiche of a certain sort of play. This is 1962, and presumably the stage of the day was suffering from an influx of playwrights trying to emulate works like Waiting for Godot (1953 in French; 1955 in English) and Harold Pinter’s (The Birthday Party was 1957; The Caretaker was 1959 etc.) Actually, two of the novels I’ve read for the 1962 Club have would-be playwrights as lead characters, so it was clearly in the air.
Meanwhile, Aaron is preoccupied with his Jewish identity. That’s a common theme of Banks’ work – and we mustn’t forget, of course, that this is only 17 years after the end of the Second World War. Characters like Aaron grew up with the most violent anti-Semitism being loud and clear across Europe. Early on, his sister rejects Martha’s suggestion that he write a play about Jewish people:
“Why not Jews? I want to understand this.”
“Primarily because we want the play to be a success.”
“Why should Jewish characters hinder that?”
“Because it’s esoteric. It’s all right to put shaggy old East End pawnbrokers or sharp-nosed shysters or hand-spreading fat crooks into a play for laughs or a gentle tear or two. But you can’t write a serious play exploring Jewish feelings and expect anybody but Jews to understand it.”
Anti-Semitism is sadly all too present in 2023, but I hope no novelist would feel that the above dialogue was an accurate reflection of the arts today. As a sidenote, I can’t find out whether Lynne Reid Banks is Jewish or not, and it does make a difference to how I respond to her writing. She so often returns to ‘Jewishness’ as a theme, particularly people who are ashamed of being Jewish – which feels like a vulnerable thing to explore if she is Jewish, and… well, opinions vary on whether or not it’s appropriate if she isn’t Jewish.
Aaron writes his play and it is put on by a small theatre group – and, twist, it becomes a big success. Aaron at first finds this amusing – but Martha points out that his reputation as a writer is now settled. He can’t become a new novelist without this reputation. One thing leads to another, and they decide to move together to a kibbutz in Israel – a sort of communal living compound. They are able to move there under the then-rule that any Jewish person around the world could move to Israel (I believe it’s a bit more stringent now).
It was one thing not to be wanted in the place you were born in. That might not be enough to make you get out – it might only make you more stubbornly determined to dig in. But if there was a place that did want you – wanted you so badly it didn’t even ask whether you had tuberculosis or a criminal record, let alone whether you were popular in the place you came from or whether you liked yourself or whether you had the guts to stand on your own two feet – then what sort of a bloody fool would you have to be not to go there? Surely there, if anywhere, you could start again with nothing chalked up against you, even in your own mind.
Yes, it is a bit of a jump! But somehow it feels plausible in the novel. What works slightly less well is jumping to another country and another voice – because the first half has been in Martha’s first-person perspective, and the second half (such as that quote above) is from Aaron’s first-person perspective. By changing all the parameters in one fell swoop, it does feel like two very different novels.
Though Martha is not Jewish, they are accepted onto the kibbutz because they lie that they’re married. From the start, it doesn’t go well. Aaron is not built for physical labour, and finds the hours in baking heat harvesting vegetables both exhausting and mindless. He doesn’t particularly like the communal way of eating, or having other people’s children everywhere. Perhaps because he is escaping somewhere rather than being excited about the arrival, he resists everything. Even though we are in his mind, he is not a sympathetic character. It is evident that he considers himself too good for this.
Martha, meanwhile, is a better fit. She seems to have changed a lot from the first half – perhaps a convincing contrast of the way she sees herself, versus how Aaron sees her. She is more compliant, more liked. Banks lived on a kibbutz herself for a while, and she certainly conveys it very well. I can see why it’s a setting she returns to in several of her books.
I shan’t give any more of the plot – but I will say I liked An End To Running very much. Lynne Reid Banks is brilliant at enveloping you in a world and making it deeply familiar to you – bringing across both the pain and the discomfort of familiarity. My qualms about the novel are really that it is two novels, barely hinged together. If one were the sequel to the other, I think it could have worked. But as it is, the leap of perspective and setting, and the concomitant change of tone, means it’s hard to think of An End To Running as one whole.
And how representative of 1962 is this club choice? There are certain things that could only be from this period – from the vogue for a certain form of highbrow theatre to the relatively recent re-creation of Israel as an independent country. The cover does its best to seem racy, but this is a fairly minor part of the plot – it would have been shocking three decades earlier, but is pretty tame for 1962.
I’d never recommend this as the best place to start with Lynne Reid Banks, and it certainly won’t dislodge The L-Shaped Room in my affections – but I do think, beside that novel, she is not as widely read as she deserves. Perhaps her interest in Jewishness means her novels are more vulnerable to dating poorly, but she is an exceptionally good writer and I hope more people read her.
