Lynne Reid Banks

Children at the Gate (1968) by Lynne Reid Banks

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Nobody immerses you in a world like Lynne Reid Banks. Given how devotedly I love The L-Shaped Room, it is curious how slowly I have read the rest of her works. But perhaps you’ve noticed one popping up here every year or so, and I’m enjoying getting more familiar with her wider work. I started with the ones set in the UK, since I always feel a little uneasy with a ‘Brits abroad!’ novel, particularly one from many decades ago – what sort of attitudes will it take for granted? I’d so much rather read about other countries from the perspective of someone from that country.

But Lynne Reid Banks has the honourable exception that she at least lived in Israel for a good number of years. And the protagonist of Children at the Gate (1968) is, like Lynne Reid Banks, an immigrant from a Western country – in the case of Gerda, Canada. Unlike Banks, Gerda is Jewish. And she has come to Acre (or Acco), Israel, following a recent divorce and a tragedy that we gradually piece together – one that has brought her to the brink.

Gerda’s only friend is Kofi, an Arab-Israeli man who is forthright and caring and suffering his own tragedies. He is easily the most lovable person in the novel, and Banks excels at creating men who are broken but kind – Kofi is like a stronger, more resilient version of Toby from The L-Shaped Room. He is, I suspect, something of authorial wish-fulfilment.

Reading a book set in the Middle East is, of course, a setting that comes with a lot of weight. Banks doesn’t skirt around the tensions between Israel and Palestine, or between Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis, but because the novel is focalised through Gerda, the narrative shares her narrow view. Gerda, of course, knows a good deal about the geopolitical situation. But she is more immediately invested in her own life and her own hurts.

I don’t know how Banks does it, but she takes me totally into any world she creates. We wholly inhabit the buildings or rooms she describes. They become the whole world, and the reader becomes enveloped in the isolation and loneliness that Gerda experiences. It is largely self-inflicted, but that never made pain any easier to bear.

The square outside was pitch dark except for a paraffin lamp hissing high up on one of the arched galleries opposite. Our house has iron balconies but the rest of the square was built much earlier and has a kind of cloister with beautiful arches at first-floor level which goes round three sides of the square. I say ‘beautiful’ because at night they are – this is  Acco’s second self, her night-self, when all the day-smells are lifted from her and replaced by cool sea-winds drifting through her narrow alleys and flooding softly into the open squares; when darkness covers the dirt and squalor like snow, leaving only the shapes, the smooth outlines of domes and minarets against the stars, the perfectly balanced archways, the mysterious broken flights of stairs and half-open doorways, the cold but not unkind flare of a paraffin lamp showing a brief interior, its walls painted in grotto shades of blue and green and hung with prints whose cheap tastelessness a passing glimpse does not show.

Gerda is not satisfied with the life she has jumped into. It is really just an escape from a different, distant life that needed to be over. ‘I walked home through the maze of cobbled alleys and archways and squares. My loneliness was, for once, simple and uncomplicated.’ Banks is a pro at the short, sharp observation, and that reflection on her type of loneliness is not only accurate – it also tells us about the sort of self-analyst that Gerda is. She can be self-pitying at times, but she is the first to assess and berate herself.

I’m going to have to tell you a bit more of the plot, so stop reading if you want to get Children at the Gate and go in completely blind. But, to be honest, the cover and the title of the novel might clue you into something else that is going to happen. And it is the only really clumsy thing that Banks does in the novel. Because, suddenly, all the Gerda can think about is her desperation to have a child. It goes from something she hasn’t really considered to an all-devouring obsession.

Kofi is the man to help her. To save her (from herself, or from loneliness, or fear), Kofi convinces her to join a kibbutz. Lynne Reid Banks lived on a kibbutz and loves writing about them in her novels, often from the perspective of an outsider who finds themselves at odds to the environment. And Gerda is not an easy fit. Even among the other North Americans there, she doesn’t seem to slip into the role with ease. And things get yet more complicated when she ‘adopts’ a young girl called Ella. Her fast-track to motherhood is complete in one fell swoop – and the emotional response has to trail after it.

Of course I don’t know yet the full extent of what I’ve undertaken, but what fills me with anxiety is trying to analyse my own feelings towards her. I am obsessed with the need to make her well, to see her fat and laughing, to hear her chattering away to other children. I watch her by the hour, trying to imagine her with a head of curly hair, with an expression of happiness on her face. And I want her to turn to me. I want that desperately, that, even more than her health, is why I am really doing all this.

But do I love her? Do I love her? Or do I just want her to love me?

Adoption – even the informal sort that Gerda has undertaken – certainly should never be done as spontaneously and selfishly as this. Gerda has clearly adopted Ella to fill a hole she perceives in her own life, and Ella herself is something of an afterthought. And, yes, there are two children on the cover. A second ‘adoption’ follows, of Ella’s brother, and the young boy is violent, angry, fearful and has a vicious, jealous relationship with Ella. Both the siblings are Arab, and that adds further to the unstable dynamic of this new, chaotic family that is ruled by uncertainty. And yet, over time, the uncertainty becomes a sort of fierce love.

I shan’t go any further with the plot, but it is often fraught and often sad, and people behave unwisely and sometimes unkindly. But there is still somehow a force through it – the power of different kinds of love to overcome all the oppositions stacked in front of them. And maybe even the irrationality of love, and the damage it can bring in its wake, even if it comes from the best motives.

And, truth be told, it often doesn’t. Gerda is an immensely flawed character, and if you’re the sort of reader who gets frustrated at people behaving foolishly, then you’ll find Children at the Gate frustrating. But I think I loved it. Lynne Reid Banks creates characters who are so infuriatingly real that I can’t help care about them and want to know more and more about them. They are certainly all deeply interesting – and interesting is the best thing for a fictional creation to be, in my book.

Children at the Gate doesn’t have the life-affirming comfort that I unexpectedly found amidst the squalor of The L-Shaped Room, but it is still rich in life. It has power, vividness, and certainly demands emotional investment from the reader. I’m not sure I’d read it again, but it reaffirms my belief in Lynne Reid Banks’ unusual and sometimes uncomfortable brilliance.

Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks

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Long-termers here will know how much I love The L-Shaped Room, and over the past couple of years I’ve been exploring more of Lynne Reid Banks’s considerable output – further prompted by her death earlier this year. Her writing for novels slowed considerably, and in fact she only published two novels for adults during my lifetime. The first of those is Casualties (1986). And the insipid cover is certainly the worst of the 1980s.

The narrator is Sue. She is a frustrated writer in a frustrating marriage. She rows often with her husband, Cal, and is irked and upset by the way he and she differ in raising their children. Any conversation ends in a fight and it’s clear that she is debating ending the marriage. Her work is no better: having written one literary novel, she found she was able to get more success and more money writing soppy books she can’t respect. But the economics of the household demand it.

The fact that I’ve just invested nearly £3,000 in a word processor and printer, complete with all the floppy trimmings, which should make me feel better about it somehow, but has only made everything worse because now I can turn out four books a year with as little effort as I formerly took to write three.

Effort. There. That’s the key to much of my disquiet. It’s become effortless, and writing shouldn’t be. My first (I nearly said my real) book was written in blood, sweat and tears. Now I sit down for a regular three-hour stint most days and out it pours. I see it coming up in those little eerie green letters on the screen and wonder where it’s all coming from and feel like a conduit running between that costly machine and some over-embellished silver-gilt cornucopia on a chypre-scented pink cloud somewhere.

Into this very comfortable and middle-class life – but one Sue finds deeply unsatisfying – comes contact from Mariolain. Mariolain – there is a curious footnote from Banks, saying she knows it should be spelled Marjolijn, but has decided not too – is a friend from Sue’s distant past. They were close as teenagers, and penpals until that petered out. There was one moment of reunion, years back, but nothing since. On something of a whim, Sue agrees to take her family to visit Mariolain  in Holland.

The best parts of the novel, in my opinion, are the dynamics of the two families meeting. Mariolain and Sue manage to resurrect long-forgotten affections, finding their differences and changes interesting rather than sad. Their respective husbands and children are less enthusiastically brought into the clash, and Banks is very good on the well-meaning, uncertain union of a whole group of people who have very little in common. Each family naturally forms into individual tribes, while there are members of each who seek greater sympathy on the other side. It’s clearest in the children – feuding siblings will form a united front against a common ‘enemy’ – but it’s there in the adults too.

Less successful, in my opinion, is the main reason for the novel. Mariolain was a child during Nazi occupation. Her family sheltered Jews, and lived through the dire food shortages and abiding fears of occupation. Much of the novel takes place in flashback to these scenes.

Perhaps Banks could have written a brilliant novel set entirely in that time and place. What worked less for me is what often doesn’t work in novels which flashback: even the most urgent events lose urgency if they are buried in the past. There was a vibrancy to the contemporary scenes that wasn’t there in the historical ones, even when the historical ones were undeniably more momentous. It’s the reason I tend not to read historical fiction, and it deadened sections of the novel.

More compelling was what we saw about the far-reaching impact of this trauma. Early in the novel, Banks spells out the novel’s theme in Sue’s voice:

I can see now that Cal is right when he says that the worst thing about wars is not the casualties that happen on the battlefield, but the ripples going out from them, on and on towards some shore so impossibly remote in terms of time that effectively it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it would be more subtle to show rather than tell, but at least we know where the novel is going and which bits we should pay most attention to. I thought Cal’s summing up was more powerful:

Cal took a deep breath and turned to me. “It’s not over yet, here,” he said. “The war. In England it’s over. I didn’t realise.”

“We weren’t occupied,” I said.

Is it still possible to write a contemporary novel about the effects of the Second World War? The youngest people who remember it would be perhaps in their 80s, so there’s still scope for it – but perhaps not with the culture-saturating sense that Banks can bring to 1980s Holland.

A hallmark of Banks’ writing is how compelling it is; how urgently you want to turn the pages. She creates worlds that you are totally immersed in, never more so than the l-shaped room and the block of flats its in. Sadly I can’t say the same for this novel, which is interesting rather than captivating. The cover quote from the Daily Telegraph says “How lucky we are to have Lynne Reid Banks! Casualties is her eighth novel and easily the best.” Well, I absolutely agree with the first half of that. By no stretch of the imagination is Casualties her best novel – but I’m glad to have read it nonetheless.

My Darling Villain by Lynne Reid Banks

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It’s well-documented that I deeply love Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room and its sequels – and somehow it has taken me quite a few years to properly explore the rest of her output. Partly that’s because of how much I enjoy re-reading The L-Shaped Room, and partly it’s because I’ve been worried that the racism and homophobia that I’ve learned to expect and overlook in The L-Shaped Room might be too off-putting in a novel I’m not familiar with. Over the past few years I’ve been taking a deep breath and reading more Lynne Reid Banks.

Well, in 2021 I read The Warning Bell and it was super racist. Last year I read An End To Running and really liked it, with the caveat that it felt like two novels, barely hinged together. Onto My Darling Villain (1977) – which has ended up being the most successful of the lot for me, I’m pleased to say.

Firstly – look, my copy is signed! (Hopefully I have successfully embedded a post from my Instagram here.)

 

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My Darling Villain is, I supposed, a young adult novel – inasmuch as the characters are teenagers and the prose is suitable for a slightly younger audience – but I don’t think I’d have blinked an eye if it were marketed to adults. The main relationship may be between people on the cusp of adulthood, but the whole book is drenched in topics that could work at any age – at least any age in Britain. Because this is a book about that perennial British theme: a relationship between different classes.

The narrator of My Darling Villain is Kate. She has recently turned 15 and is (like so many heroines of such books) not in the first echelon of popularity at her school. She’s probably not in the second either, but she does have some good friends – and, together, they devise a party. It’s intended to catch the attention of a boy she has her eye on, and to be a quiet affair with a handful of people from school. She even invites a girl she actively despises, because they are curious about her mature-sounding boyfriend.

It turns out, of course, that the party is beset with gate-crashers. In an era before the internet, word doesn’t spread as disastrously far as it might – but certainly some unsavoury types come along. Crockery gets broken, food is smeared on the wall, unspeakable things happen in the bathroom, and far too much alcohol is drunk. It’s a disaster. Except for one thing – Kate meets Mark Collins.

At first, she categorises him among the unwelcome hoodlums who are doing dastardly things to the house. But he, in fact, is the one who stays behind to help clean up while others flee. And here is her first proper encounter, earlier in the evening.

“Let’s dance.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

Ridiculous as it seems, I couldn’t find an answer. Except, “Because you’re an erk and I don’t dance with erks.” Maybe I should have said that. But all my life I had seen my father and mother behaving with perfect politeness to everyone who came to our house. They were even polite to the awful men who came to ask for our television licence (we had it all the time), and to the angry father who came to complain that Bruce had knocked his son off his bicycle (a lie) and even to the vicar, whom Dad afterwards described as an oily antediluvian old hypocrtie. Well, maybe Dad himself was the hypocrite, for welcoming the old fellow to his face and being rude behind his back; but I’d got the idea that the important thing was courtesy, especially in one’s own house, and because of that I was too inhibited to tell Mark Collins to get lost. So I danced with him,

He danced very well. You could say he was an expert. I’m crazy about dancing and very few boys I know really can. We danced apart, facing each other, and he fixed his eyes on mine in a strange way I wasn’t used to – our boys don’t look at you when they dance.

It’s clear from the outset that Kate categorises herself and Mark in different, well, categories. He is not one of ‘our boys’. Kate is very middle-class – slightly unconventionally so, since her father is an actor who has made a name for himself in a popular TV drama, but middle-class nonetheless. Mark is very working-class. He rides a motorbike everywhere, lives in a small house with a wide extended family, and is expected to follow his father into working as a mechanic. (Kate’s brother, meanwhile, would love to be a mechanic – but their parents aren’t unconventional enough to allow a career path that involves dropping out of higher education.)

If Mark had been in a very slightly different class, perhaps he could be snubbed. But he is so different from Kate’s that she feels she has to be ‘polite’ to him, and show ‘courtesy’. It is the performative friendliness of the middle-class. But it comes alongside the heart and hormones of a teenager. It isn’t long before Kate is smitten with Mark.

And, reader, I suspect you will be too. I fell rather hard for this pairing too. Perhaps Mark is a bit of wish-fulfilment – he is kind, honest, articulate and, of course, handsome. But Lynne Reid Banks does it well. She has crafted exactly the sort of young man that a heroine like Kate needs to open up her horizons, and to challenge her expectations.

The path isn’t plain sailing, of course. Both families have problems with them dating. Her parents are worried that her schoolwork will suffer if she is too distracted, and anxiously forbid her from getting on the motorbike – but Kate rightly suspect that class prejudice is part of their objections (and, indeed, has hardly shed her own). Mark’s family, meanwhile, feel awkward and unsure around Kate, and can feel the judgement that could come from her side. Lynne Reid Banks is so good at making a relationship – even one between teenagers – feel real and authentic, so that the obstacles they encounter seem organic rather than merely plot points.

Alongside this story are others that feel more uncomfortable – particulary one about a young woman lodging with the neighbours who claims the son of the family has got her pregnant, while nobody (including Kate) believes her. Then there’s the nearby Jewish family who face some anti-Semitism, and Lynne Reid Banks goes awkwardly over the top in her pro-Jewish descriptions, so that it somehow goes full circle and feels a little anti-Semitic itself.

I suppose what I’m saying is that there are plenty of elements in this 1977 novel that wouldn’t appear in a 2024 novel. But nothing terribly objectionable, and certainly nothing to match the racism of The Warning Bell. And Kate and Mark’s rocky teenage relationship feels timeless – certainly class remains a topic that British writers will return to, and Banks doesn’t offer any easy answers. She does give us two very appealing protagonists – flawed, absolutely, but people I ended up caring very deeply about. I can only imagine how heavily I’d have fallen for My Darling Villain if I’d read it as a teenager. I fell pretty hard as a 38-year-old.

 

An End To Running by Lynne Reid Banks #1962Club

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(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.

The Warning Bell by Lynne Reid Banks

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The L-Shaped Room is one of my favourite novels, and I’ve read it and its sequels quite often over the years – but have read oddly little of Lynne Reid Banks’ other novels since a brief spate about twenty years ago. And I’ve owned The Warning Bell (1984) since probably about 2003, so it seems about time I read it.

Maggie is a teenager when the novel begins – with two brothers, the censorious Ian and the more laissez-faire Stip, and parents who seem ordinary and conservative to her. She longs to escape the community in Scotland that she sees as backward and repressive, and dreams of finding success as an actress. Her best friend Tanya longs for the same thing and, as the novel opens, they have both been caught in a series of lies to go and see a production of Oklahoma.

The same deceit comes into play a little later when Maggie goes to drama school – throughout which she is deceiving her father into paying, as he thinks she is doing a different course at a different university. She is aided and abetted by her secondary school drama teacher – indeed, it is this teacher’s idea – and Banks is great at the feelings of guilt and freedom that intertwine, even if she is a little more haphazard on the actual details of how this deception would take place. When it comes out, the proverbial inevitably hits the fan.

Maggie seems a little similar to The L-Shaped Room’s Jane in the opening chapters of the novel. Like Jane, she is at odds with her father and has to start a life estranged from her family – albeit for different reasons. But where Jane enters a new community in her block of flats, gradually getting to know and love the people around her, Maggie’s immediate future is rather darker. She is sexually assaulted by a man she is dating, discovers she is pregnant, and decides to marry him.

The title of the novel is explained in the early pages of the novel, and this is one of many moments where the bell is clanging loudly…

Maggie’s mother once said, ‘You know, Maggie, the vainest and most futile mental exercise in the world is tracing back some accident or blunder to its origins, and letting one’s heart gnaw itself in regret that one didn’t know what was going to result. You know: ”If I hadn’t gone there, met so-and-so, done this or not done that…” One’s whole life can turn on some tiny thing. It’s not fair. There ought to be a bell, a warning bell, sounding at dangerous corners. But there never, never is.’

But Maggie, on reflection, decided that there very often is a warning bell. It may not go clang-clang with great noisy obviousness. But it rings in other ways. She could remember many turning-points in her own life which were marked by bells of a sort. Her innumerable blunders had not resulted from an absence of bells, but her wilfulness in ignoring them.

In justice to Banks, the rape is recognised as being horrific, and Maggie’s decision to marry Bruce is not presented as something wise or justified. I’m racing through the plot a little here, because the novel is packed with incident, but Banks is very good at conveying the feel of living another person’s life, and I certainly felt plunged into Maggie’s – including all the mistakes, horrors, rejections, pressures and so on. Considering dark things happen, The Warning Bell is not a bleak novel at all. Banks recognises the confusing way that life can be a tapestry of bad and good simultaneously, without one blocking out the other.

I was really loving the novel, in fact. Banks writes brilliantly, and I was getting the same sense of full immersion that I always get when I re-read The L-Shaped Room. But then… Maggie and Bruce move to Nigeria. And… yikes.

There are definitely racist elements in The L-Shaped Room, but I always felt that they were on the part of the character – and that she grows to realise she is terribly wrong. In The Warning Bell, the way Nigerians are portrayed is just as racist in the narrative voice as in the different characters’. They are all depicted as unintelligent, primitive, and desperate to be servile to the white characters – who consider themselves set apart and far better in every way, and the narrative seems to agree with them. It was really unpleasant to read, and the sort of casually racist set up that I was surprised to see so openly in a novel published so recently.

Things improve when Maggie returns to the UK, and she deals with the conflicting impulses of motherhood, career, romance and friendship. These are all more or less eternal themes of women’s lives, and Banks brings them together convincingly and compellingly. Well, convincing insofar as becoming a national TV newsreader is considered a fall-back option for a wannabe actress.

My only criticism in this second half of the book is that the pacing is sometimes a bit awry. It does seem to enter rather a gallop in the final section of the novel, jumping ahead both in terms of time and the emotional curve of the narrative. So, overall, your stomach for this novel will depend on how much you can cope with the horrendous racism that’s prevalent for about fifty pages. I loved diving back into the incredible storytelling that Banks is so good at – but with a nasty taste in my mouth at the same time.

On re-reading The L-Shaped Room

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One of my ongoing, unsuccessful (and, to be fair, fairly inactive) battles is to convince Rachel that we should read The L-Shaped Room (1960) on the Tea or Books? podcast. It’s one of my favourite books, and I’ve read it a fair few times – and it’s not often I’ll re-read a book at all, let alone more than once. In the end, I decided just to re-read it (again) myself. And, rather than write another review of it, I’ll take you through the experience I had…

Taking the book off the shelf

As someone pointed out in an Instagram comment, my copy is definitely falling apart. The spine went a long time ago, there are tears in some pages, and the whole thing might just crumble into dust at this point. It was in pretty bad condition when I paid 10p for it in a charity shop in Pershore, Worcestershire, buying it on the strength of having loved The Farthest-Away Mountain and The Indian in the Cupboard as a child.

But I can’t get rid of this copy. Maybe one day I’ll have to buy another, if this one gets too fragile to hold, but I love it too much to throw or give it away. Not because of the design or feel, but because it has been with me for so long, and was one of the first adult novels I loved.

Starting the book

There wasn’t much to be said for the place, really, but it had a roof over it and a door which locked from the inside, which was all I cared about just then. I didn’t even bother to take in the details – they were pretty sordid, but I didn’t notice them so they didn’t depress me; perhaps because I was already at rock-bottom. I just threw my one suitcase on to the bed, took my few belongings out of it and shut them all into one drawer of the three-legged chest of drawers. Then there didn’t seem to be anything else I ought to do so I sat in the arm-chair and stared out of the window.

This is the first paragraph and I’m instantly so happy. This description of a room isn’t exactly paradisiacal – it’s meant to be the opposite – but I feel like I’m coming home. No, my home isn’t remotely like this – but the world of the novel is one I love so much that it feels like coming to home to be back in that block of flats, and back in the L-shaped room.

The l-shaped room

Speaking of – once we’ve seen a bit of Jane’s background (in the theatre, then in a café, then being forced to leave home because she’s got pregnant – rattling through the premise, sorry) we’re in the room. And I realise that I have never paid any lasting attention to the description of the layout that Lynne Reid Banks gives. I’ve blogged before about how I can’t visualise descriptions in books – and it’s definitely true of layout. Try as I might, I can’t put those pieces together in my mind. So, for me, her room is laid out exactly as it is on the book cover.

The discriminatory language… 

When I first read the novel, in 2002 or thereabouts, I wasn’t happy about the racism and discriminatory language used about gay people. I’m still not happy about it, of course – even if it’s largely put in the mouths of characters we’re not supposed to agree with. Jane herself is rather racist as the novel starts, though perhaps because I know she’ll change her mind later in the book, I can get through these pages. But there are some sentences that are really tough to read.

Toby and Jane

It is very, very rare that I care about a will-they-won’t-they couple in a book. Reading about romance tends to bore me rather, and I’m much more interested in reading about a couple who’ve been married for thirty years than by young suitors. But Toby and Jane might be that couple. Even though I can’t actually remember whether or not they end up together – either at the end of the book or at the end of the trilogy. Despite all those re-readings, and my love of them, that detail has disappeared. But Toby is great. He comes along, rattling away about his writing and his life, and Jane wants nothing to do with anyone. But you know from the first moment that he’ll wear her down, and they’ll become friends and comrades if nothing else. As her friend Dottie says, “First of all I thought he was just some
little fledgling that had fallen out of its nest, but I very soon realised there was more to him than that.”

What did I remember?

My terrible memory is bad for many things, but good for re-reading. While the atmosphere of a book stays with me, the details usually flit from my mind pretty quickly – and, even after four reads, I’d forgotten pretty much everything that takes place at Jane’s workplace. It’s not as prominent as the block of flats, but there is quite a fun dynamic with her brash but friendly boss. She does the PR for a hotel, and there is an extended scene of her trying to manage a staged meeting between a comedian and a diva, and it’s very amusing. As I read it, it all came back to me – but if you’d asked me before I started this re-read what Jane did for a living, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

Was it as good as I remembered?

Of course. This many times in, I know it’s a reliable joy. Seeing Jane grow to love the people she is surrounded with, and deal with the enormous life changes facing her, was as wonderful as always. Perhaps this novel wouldn’t have captivated me in the same way if I’d read it a few years later, but I know it’s now down as one of my all-time favourites and will never be dislodged from there.

Will I read the sequels next?

As always, I ended the novel bereft that I was leaving their company – leaving the l-shaped room and the house and the experience of reading the book. And it’s very tempting to go onto The Backward Shadow and Two Is Lonely, that continue Jane’s story. This time, I probably won’t. They’re both good, but they leave the flat behind – and I miss the flat terribly when I’m reading those books. So I’d certainly recommend them, and I’ve read them three times each, but I only give in to the urge to read them (and feel slightly disappointed) every other time I read The L-Shaped Room.

Letter-Shaped Living

StuckinaBook All , , 7 Comments

Oh, but you’re good. Well done to everyone who correctly identified The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks, whichever method you used to spot it. It feels a bit fraudulent to label a book you May Not Have Heard About, but it’s so good that it’s going on my 50 Books nonetheless.

I read The L-Shaped Room back in 2001, having bought it on a whim for 10p, and utterly loved it. It was with some trepidation that I returned to it in 2008 – after all, though seven years may not seem like a very long time, I only really started reading Proper Books in 2000, so it’s a long time for me. I needn’t have worried – this 1960 novel of Jane Graham, unmarried and pregnant, moving into her L-shaped room, was still brilliant. I was just as gripped this time, though I knew (in surprisingly close detail) what would happen throughout the novel.

Jane is thrown out by her father when he finds out she is pregnant, and she must become independent. She chooses “an ugly, degraded district in which to find myself a room… in some obscure way I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to put myself in the setting that seemed proper to my situation.” Determined not to engage with the other occupants of the building, to suffer her solitude, she cannot help learn about them and grow to like them. There’s John, a kind, black jazz-player in the room next door; Mavis, an elderly spinster with a mania for collecting ornaments; Doris her constantly indignant landlady; even the prostitutes on the basement floor. Most importantly, there is Toby – a writer who hides his Jewishness and is irrepressibly friendly.

Banks’ strength is her characters – all of them had stayed in my head from 2001, and it was like greeting old friends. None are stereotypical (which makes it difficult to describe them, above, truth be told) and none are too nice, either – they are real people, with real motives and emotions and consequences. You love them for it, but it makes their trials and tribulations all the more traumatic for the reader.

I’ve read the sequels, The Backward Shadow and Two Is Lonely, back in 2001/2, and remember them both being good – though not as good. Last night I watched the film. I do love a black and white film – it makes one feel effortlessly intelligent. If I hadn’t just read the book, I’d probably have really loved it – but there are so many deviations. I can cope with a film missing out bits of the book, time constraints and all, but this one changed all sorts of details needlessly. Jane was French (actress can’t do an accent, I expect), her mother wasn’t dead and we never get to see her father, such an important aspect of the book. And why they gave her a baby girl instead of a boy, I can’t imagine. Still, the actors are brilliant – each looks and acts just right. Shame about the writing.

If you’ve not read The L-Shaped Room, do get a copy. Lots cheap on Amazon. And it’s also in print, which is rare enough for the books I recommend as favourites! Jane Graham will stay with you for years, as will her L-shaped room.