My Darling Villain by Lynne Reid Banks

It’s well-documented that I deeply love Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room and its sequels – and somehow it has taken me quite a few years to properly explore the rest of her output. Partly that’s because of how much I enjoy re-reading The L-Shaped Room, and partly it’s because I’ve been worried that the racism and homophobia that I’ve learned to expect and overlook in The L-Shaped Room might be too off-putting in a novel I’m not familiar with. Over the past few years I’ve been taking a deep breath and reading more Lynne Reid Banks.

Well, in 2021 I read The Warning Bell and it was super racist. Last year I read An End To Running and really liked it, with the caveat that it felt like two novels, barely hinged together. Onto My Darling Villain (1977) – which has ended up being the most successful of the lot for me, I’m pleased to say.

Firstly – look, my copy is signed! (Hopefully I have successfully embedded a post from my Instagram here.)

 

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My Darling Villain is, I supposed, a young adult novel – inasmuch as the characters are teenagers and the prose is suitable for a slightly younger audience – but I don’t think I’d have blinked an eye if it were marketed to adults. The main relationship may be between people on the cusp of adulthood, but the whole book is drenched in topics that could work at any age – at least any age in Britain. Because this is a book about that perennial British theme: a relationship between different classes.

The narrator of My Darling Villain is Kate. She has recently turned 15 and is (like so many heroines of such books) not in the first echelon of popularity at her school. She’s probably not in the second either, but she does have some good friends – and, together, they devise a party. It’s intended to catch the attention of a boy she has her eye on, and to be a quiet affair with a handful of people from school. She even invites a girl she actively despises, because they are curious about her mature-sounding boyfriend.

It turns out, of course, that the party is beset with gate-crashers. In an era before the internet, word doesn’t spread as disastrously far as it might – but certainly some unsavoury types come along. Crockery gets broken, food is smeared on the wall, unspeakable things happen in the bathroom, and far too much alcohol is drunk. It’s a disaster. Except for one thing – Kate meets Mark Collins.

At first, she categorises him among the unwelcome hoodlums who are doing dastardly things to the house. But he, in fact, is the one who stays behind to help clean up while others flee. And here is her first proper encounter, earlier in the evening.

“Let’s dance.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

Ridiculous as it seems, I couldn’t find an answer. Except, “Because you’re an erk and I don’t dance with erks.” Maybe I should have said that. But all my life I had seen my father and mother behaving with perfect politeness to everyone who came to our house. They were even polite to the awful men who came to ask for our television licence (we had it all the time), and to the angry father who came to complain that Bruce had knocked his son off his bicycle (a lie) and even to the vicar, whom Dad afterwards described as an oily antediluvian old hypocrtie. Well, maybe Dad himself was the hypocrite, for welcoming the old fellow to his face and being rude behind his back; but I’d got the idea that the important thing was courtesy, especially in one’s own house, and because of that I was too inhibited to tell Mark Collins to get lost. So I danced with him,

He danced very well. You could say he was an expert. I’m crazy about dancing and very few boys I know really can. We danced apart, facing each other, and he fixed his eyes on mine in a strange way I wasn’t used to – our boys don’t look at you when they dance.

It’s clear from the outset that Kate categorises herself and Mark in different, well, categories. He is not one of ‘our boys’. Kate is very middle-class – slightly unconventionally so, since her father is an actor who has made a name for himself in a popular TV drama, but middle-class nonetheless. Mark is very working-class. He rides a motorbike everywhere, lives in a small house with a wide extended family, and is expected to follow his father into working as a mechanic. (Kate’s brother, meanwhile, would love to be a mechanic – but their parents aren’t unconventional enough to allow a career path that involves dropping out of higher education.)

If Mark had been in a very slightly different class, perhaps he could be snubbed. But he is so different from Kate’s that she feels she has to be ‘polite’ to him, and show ‘courtesy’. It is the performative friendliness of the middle-class. But it comes alongside the heart and hormones of a teenager. It isn’t long before Kate is smitten with Mark.

And, reader, I suspect you will be too. I fell rather hard for this pairing too. Perhaps Mark is a bit of wish-fulfilment – he is kind, honest, articulate and, of course, handsome. But Lynne Reid Banks does it well. She has crafted exactly the sort of young man that a heroine like Kate needs to open up her horizons, and to challenge her expectations.

The path isn’t plain sailing, of course. Both families have problems with them dating. Her parents are worried that her schoolwork will suffer if she is too distracted, and anxiously forbid her from getting on the motorbike – but Kate rightly suspect that class prejudice is part of their objections (and, indeed, has hardly shed her own). Mark’s family, meanwhile, feel awkward and unsure around Kate, and can feel the judgement that could come from her side. Lynne Reid Banks is so good at making a relationship – even one between teenagers – feel real and authentic, so that the obstacles they encounter seem organic rather than merely plot points.

Alongside this story are others that feel more uncomfortable – particulary one about a young woman lodging with the neighbours who claims the son of the family has got her pregnant, while nobody (including Kate) believes her. Then there’s the nearby Jewish family who face some anti-Semitism, and Lynne Reid Banks goes awkwardly over the top in her pro-Jewish descriptions, so that it somehow goes full circle and feels a little anti-Semitic itself.

I suppose what I’m saying is that there are plenty of elements in this 1977 novel that wouldn’t appear in a 2024 novel. But nothing terribly objectionable, and certainly nothing to match the racism of The Warning Bell. And Kate and Mark’s rocky teenage relationship feels timeless – certainly class remains a topic that British writers will return to, and Banks doesn’t offer any easy answers. She does give us two very appealing protagonists – flawed, absolutely, but people I ended up caring very deeply about. I can only imagine how heavily I’d have fallen for My Darling Villain if I’d read it as a teenager. I fell pretty hard as a 38-year-old.