Customer Reviews

THE BACKWARD SHADOW

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The story of Henry Barclay, an Englishman cashiered at age 39 with five thousand pounds to invest, and when he meets Dottie, a chic Londoner temporarily holed up in a country village, she inveigles Henry into investing his cash in the small made-goods shop she is hoping to start up with her girlhood friend Jane Graham. Jane, the heroine of Lynne Reid Banks' earlier novel, The L-Shaped Room, has left Fulham and the love of her life, novelist Toby Coleman, because her beloved aunt Addy has died, leaving Jane a country cottage and the four hundred pounds that literary agent Billie Lee has wangled for American publication of Addy's own novel. (We never hear the name of that book, but in a memorable scene, Jane derides Toby for calling his book Brave Coward.)

Added to the mix, Dottie has left swinging London because of her extreme moral revulsion at the pleasure-mad Vanity Fair lifestyle practiced there. One unpleasant vestige is Dottie's former boyfriend, Alan Innes, a creep who comes down to the country cottage and, finding Dottie away, attempts to rape poor Jane even with baby David asleep in his cradle in the next room.

Back to Henry. He is the son of a tyrannical father who never let him get his own way and kept him chained to selling in a junk shop his entire life. Now the father has remarried a lovely girl younger than Henry himself, the radiant Jo, a Jane Asher sort of woman, and Ted and Jo have a baby girl Amanda, so that Henry now has a little sister at age 39. The big story in the book is how Dottie decides to have her own store, Us and Them, that will sell only handmade products of the countryside: outsider art, glass blown by local craftsmen, weird metal and wood objets, trinkets and cloth. Jane initially resists, for she is far too busy with her own life of trying to care for baby David by pulling down double shifts at the local pub, where she learns to draw a beer as well as a man, and also she sells stamps at the local post office for Mrs. Stephens and her senile husband.

There's a lot of plot but I haven't told you the best part! Suffice it to say that something in Henry Barclay awakens Jane's romantic interests, and the novel devolves into a romantic triangle between Henry, Jane, and the driven Dottie.

When I was in high school I loved this novel, but I can now see it is just not as good as its predecessor, although it goes to places of sadness, tragedy and remorse the other one simply avoids. It is perhaps the tragic mask next to the comic mask that was The L-Shaped Room. The backward shadow of the title, ios a concept of Dottie's that doesn't make much sense, but basically it's about how our fears of the future paralyze us in our present life and prevent us from seeking present happiness. That's how I feel about, say, ice cream.

This book is out of print, but do your best to find it anyway, it is worth the search. If you liked the L-Shaped room you will love this. It is well written, interspersing humour with passages of great feeling and emotion. Simply wonderful.