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michaelontheplanet 's review for:
The L-Shaped Room
by Lynne Reid Banks
Assured tenancy: let’s go back to 1960, before Sex and the Single Girl, Cosmo, the pill and the Equal Pay Act, and way before gay lib or the idea that a sign saying No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish was any other than the soundest common sense. Jane, middle class and naïve, runs away from daddy and security on discovering she is pregnant to a squalid rooming house in Fulham - the title is a nod to Virgina Woolf. There she fights her corner against a cruel/indifferent world, in part represented by slatternly landlady Doris, but aided by her neighbours, Jewish Toby, Black John and the two tarts in the basement.
This is an exceptional portrait of the “self-created hells a sensitive, emotional woman will always encounter in her dealings with herself and other people” that is quite on a par with one of Jean Rhys’s antiheroines or the excellent women of Miss Pym. Even the dated mores, with some of the ways ethnicity and sexuality are described discomfiting 60 years on, as well as the slight disappointment one feels that Jane’s redemption is in returning to her father’s house, are an important part of the evolution of liberated thinking, history which shouldn’t be erased. You can’t run before you walk.
As small and contained as the room it describes, Lynne Reid Banks has created and furnished a time capsule that predicts and pre-empts Swinging London, just as it eludes so many of those who were there at the time.
This is an exceptional portrait of the “self-created hells a sensitive, emotional woman will always encounter in her dealings with herself and other people” that is quite on a par with one of Jean Rhys’s antiheroines or the excellent women of Miss Pym. Even the dated mores, with some of the ways ethnicity and sexuality are described discomfiting 60 years on, as well as the slight disappointment one feels that Jane’s redemption is in returning to her father’s house, are an important part of the evolution of liberated thinking, history which shouldn’t be erased. You can’t run before you walk.
As small and contained as the room it describes, Lynne Reid Banks has created and furnished a time capsule that predicts and pre-empts Swinging London, just as it eludes so many of those who were there at the time.