Two Isn't Lonely

Have you ever read Two Is Lonely by Lynne Reid Banks?

It is the third book in the L-Shaped Room trilogy. A film was made of the first...pretty mediocre and, considering the original purpose, inaccurate in my opinion. But the book is extraordinary. And unlike the majority of unequal sequels, they just get better.

In The L-Shaped Room Jane Graham, after a first somewhat unsuccessful sexual experience at the age of 29, finds herself pregnant and unmarried in England in the 1950s. She decides to keep the baby and the 3 books chart both the personal and social challenges of being a single mother to an illegitimate child. More importantly, though, they follow her amazing, real and utterly human nature...the mistakes and stubborness and repression and imagination in one individual in ways I at one point found so breathtaking I would carry the books around in my handbag as though they were my own children (who I will of course carry around in my handbag at all times) and describe and dwell on at the drop of a hat to anyone who expressed even the remotest polite interest.

The third book, Two Is Lonely, charts Jane's struggle to come to terms with her little boy's fatherlessness...the effect on him and the inevitable guilt. It's magnified by the fact that she, somewhat "modernly", chose not to marry the father because they did not love one-another. He did offer but not only did she refuse him but, because of an avulsion to his weak nature and pathetic personality, decided to sever all contact and the possibly essential ties between father and son. Now he needs a father. He needs one very badly. And before she can accept an offer of marriage from Andy - her now-suitor and a complex, compassionate and brutally favourable choice, she must go to Israel and cut another connection. Whilst pregnant Jane began a relationship with a Jewish writer Toby Cohen, also weak-willed but an extraordinary balance to her practicalness and bright nature. The relationship didn't work out and he has since married, had 2 daughters, divorced and moved with his eldest child to a kibbutz in Israel to work the land and make what he feels a mandatory contribution in the days leading up to the Yom Kippur war.

I re-read (for perhaps the eighth time) this novel just after I arrived here in January and I am re-reading it again now. It tires me beyond reasonable doubt. I had many useful things to do today but instead I stayed reading this book, sleeping for hours at a time in between. God knows why.

And as Liron and I listened to music and drank vodka and orange I thought about two. Over the past half-year I have had no conventional partnership to speak of. Well I have only had one such in my life, in fact...a fortnight-long one which changed my head and left my insides shattered from the inside out...but since January I have lived and existed in twos, divided my days and head between one and two, quite by accident, and learned a new type of not being lonely.

Another person, another existence, another set of nature/nurture blots and beauties, creates an inevitable perspective alongside your own. It's not a matter of having someone else to consider. Depending on who you are you will or will not do that anyway. But the luxury at this age of being able to live with somebody else who is not practically dependent on you but is also going through change and sameness; struggle and joy, cannot be underestimated.

Read Two Is Lonely if you can. I had a similar tie to Anita Diamant's The Red Tent and used to give a copy to every lover who meant "something" to me (poor bastards) but apart from one individual I never shared Lynne Reid Banks and her magic on my life.

Please, please read it. And if you do, let me know what you think.