Lynne Reid Banks died last week at the age of 94, after battling cancer. During her long and accomplished life, she wrote over 40 books for both adults and children, and for me, reading them over thirty years ago, they were inspirational in a truly motivating way.
Like a lot of teenagers, I took myself far too seriously when I was 17 – I’d had my first story published in PONY magazine and was therefore convinced that I was going to be a writer. But I was studying English Literature, and therefore I wasn’t content with writing pony stories – I wanted to write Great Literature (always with a capital letters, you understand!). I studied lots of works of Great Literature, and tried to absorb all their greatness as though somehow that would help me write my own work of Great Literature! Instead, most of it paralysed my own writing. But Lynne Reid Banks was different. I loved her direct, no-nonsense style, the brevity of her descriptions, the precise understanding of guilt and self-punishment, the careful unfolding of relationships that felt so true to life.
books for both adults and children
When I first read The L-Shaped Room, I particularly loved the first-person narration and its strong characterisation. First published in 1960, it was vintage when I picked it in the late 1980s, but it didn’t matter. The heroine, Jane, pregnant and unmarried, spoke to me from across the years – and perhaps attitudes in a small seaside town in Somerset twenty or thirty years later weren’t so far removed from those depicted in the book! What was so impressive was that The L-Shaped Room was her first book, and yet so assured and well-written.
At University, we talked about the concept of defamiliarization or “making strange” when writing – i.e. bringing to life some perfectly ordinary event by making it seem extraordinary, and there’s a brilliant example of this in the scene where Jane has given herself indigestion eating a huge curry and as a result is in fear of losing the baby as she walks home from the restaurant:
“My legs were trembling and when I put my hand against my face it was burning, and yet clammy. The next time I reached a lamp-post I clung to it. It was wet and cold, but it held steady, which was more than anything else seemed to. I put my forehead against it and hung on with both hands. Then I felt the post begin to slide upwards through my hands, as if more of it were coming out of the ground. It slid up faster and faster, though I tried to hold it down. Then I felt something hard strike my knees, and I smelt a very strong smell of dog.”
Someone then comes along and picks her up from where she has fallen (with the obvious irony of that someone being a neighbour who’s a prostitute), but I’ve always thought what a striking image this was, and it’s stuck in my mind forever after (though of course, I had to look it up to quote it!).
I loved lots of her other books, especially An End to Running and the books she wrote about the Brontës, and I admired the fact she wrote for both children and adults. Most importantly for me though, she was a ‘serious’ writer for whom love and relationships were consistently strong themes, and I knew I too wanted to write about such things.
Since her death, I’ve been moved to re-read The L-Shaped Room and some of her other books as a sort of homage. Yes, they are of their time and certainly read as such now, but they are rich in emotional depth and filled with such brilliantly vivid, flawed characters that their author will live on through them for a long time to come. Lynne Reid Banks, RIP.
Jenny Roman 