What is most poignantly missing from the film is the relationship between Jane and her father and how it is resolved, with the help of his elder sister Addy. The generation gulf between the baby boomers and their parents is another pertinent topic that Reid Banks flushes from the shadows. Like the day trip the Teenager in Absolute Beginners takes with his father to Cookham that turns into a voyage of mutual recognition, Jane and her father’s gradual awareness of each other’s fundamental humanity is the most moving aspect of all in a book shot through with compassion. 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 This is a mixed bag of a story. It's good. It tells an important & interesting story. But it's a story of its time (late 1950s) with racism, prejudices and phobias. This book explores love, in all of it's various forms, and I enjoyed that. Jane meets people from all walks of life, and realises that she needs these individuals, just as much as they need her, and they help her grow in confidence. As the reader, this was joyous to read about.

Jane herself is ashamed at the beginning of this story. Over the next 9 months, she matures and grows. She becomes aware of her own insecurities, phobias, fears, prejudices....and their irrelevance. On the credit side, Jane does grow somewhat as a person as the story progresses; I found myself wondering if the author made Jane’s inner voice so critical and offensive to highlight how far she had to travel to approach a more tolerant and accepting point-of-view. She hassn’t quite gotten there by the end of the novel, though. Perhaps she progresses more in the next two books of the trilogy?

However, if one reads this as a book of its time, this is a warm, heartfelt story of growth, including getting beyond racial slurs, class distinctions and the stigma of being an unwed mother. Of course, as Jane improves the room, she improves herself. As she gets to know her neighbours (even one of the prostitutes in the basement), she realizes that even though they're different than her previous social circle and family, they're humans with love to offer of their own. As she lets them into her room, and goes into theirs, she learns more about herself and how to make choices that will allow her to love and be loved, and live with dignity and integrity. The metaphor is never strained, and it's a rather lovely story. Over a comforting cup of coffee, Jane reflects on her predicament, and a life that has similarities with the author’s own. Born in London in 1929, Lynne Reid Banks was evacuated to Canada during the Second World War, returning as a teenager in 1945 to train and then work as an actress. Jane’s recollections of pre-Equity survival in rep, living off tinned spaghetti in dreary northern towns, ring with the authenticity of autobiography. Jane doesn’t intend to mix with the other residents of the boarding house, but they are curious about her and in time she is drawn out of the shell she constructed for herself. Better you than some club for Jewish juvenile delinquents. Take it and buy a pram, and if your conscience bothers you, paint 'Down with Arabs' on one side and 'I like Kykes' on the other."

Jane is a brave character who decides to bring up the baby by herself, after her father throws her out. But her feelings are mixed, and as almost a punishment to herself she rents a grubby L-shaped room at the top of a run- down boarding house in Fulham. Her self-awareness and the way she analyses her feelings and those of people around make the novel transcend its period – although she dislikes Toby’s “useless fund of self-knowledge”. At times she wants to punish herself, and telling her father was like a bullfight, “I didn’t want to see the bull killed; I just wanted to know what it would do to me to see it.” There is warmth and humour too, including meeting someone “who wasn’t even the sort of person you could enjoy being rude to.”She forms friendships. With John, the affable musician who lives in the room next to hers. With Mavis, the elderly spinster who lives in the room below hers. And with Toby, a struggling writer, who could maybe become more than a friend.

Don’t you go paying your rent on the dot, miss,” he advises. “You keep the old cow waiting, like she does me.” This sour old boy regards the ‘chippies’ in the basement as more honourable than ‘that old faggot’ Doris, with her cavalier attitude to the settlement of bills and disregard for current popular opinion on race relations. His speech is littered with references to ‘bobos’ who ‘have got to be kept in their place’, the casual deployment of which gives as tangible a feel for the attitudes of the time as the descriptive evocation of the place. She planned to keep herself to herself, to keep her baby, and eventually to bring up her child alone. 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.

Review: The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks

Early on in the novel when she was working within an acting troupe she describes her antagonistic relationship with a gay actor who fancies her boyfriend Terry. She and Terry make out in front of this gay man to show him that they are “normal” and that he is not. Later on she visits a curry house and remarks how the Indians who serve her smile “in an enigmatic Eastern way.” It’s interesting thinking how progressive it must have been at the time to portray homosexuals and racial minorities in any way within a novel. However, no one could write such descriptions now without being considered bigoted. But, in a way, I’m glad that Jane’s provincial point of view is so blatant as it highlights her unconscious prejudices and how they contrast so sharply against the prejudice she receives as an unmarried pregnant woman in this time. She’s sympathetic and friendly with the racial and sexual minorities that she meets in the novel, but she was probably totally naïve about the way her attitude denigrated these people. Interestingly she seems more conscious of the effect her ex-boyfriend Terry’s anti-Semitic attitude has on her Jewish neighbour Toby. Sitting in front of a small baby-frilled dressing-table to put on her make-up - a fascinating procedure - she The L-Shaped Room tells the story of Jane, a single young woman who falls pregnant. Jane is a brave character who decides to bring up the baby by herself, after her father throws her out of home. Her feelings of determination are also saturated by shame. To punish herself she rents a sordid L-shaped room at the top of a run-down boarding house in Fulham. To say more would be to ruin a story that initially felt incidental but became more compelling towards the book's conclusion.