Uncle Paul

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However, to Meg’s surprise, Isabel doesn’t require help with her own mundanely taxing domestic troubles. Rather, she wants Meg to intervene in the latest drama involving their much older half-sister, the rich and highly vexing Mildred. In this Waterstones Thriller of the Month, as recommended on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, one family’s skeletons emerge on a 1950s seaside summer holiday in this classic mystery from ‘Britain’s Patricia Highsmith’ and the ‘grandmother of psycho-domestic noir’ ( Sunday Times ) I loathed the characters of Isabel and Mildred, the elder sisters of Meg, our narrator, who is calm, rational and stable in contrast to the silly-willy, dithering, blethering, can't ever decide on anything Isabel, 10 years senior to Meg, and then Mildred is stubborn, rich, spoilt, purposeless and worse, as the plot develops. I can understand perhaps, that Isabel and Mildred are stereotypes of house-wifey, no career, no degree, middle-class women, who probably got on Fremlin's nerves; but really where is this going? What follows is a wonderfully slow burn thriller with the tension ratcheting up by degrees until everyone is at screaming pitch.

Once reunited with the nervous, jumpy, Isabel, Meg finds it is a worse situation than she imagined. Fifteen years ago, Mildred discovered that her husband, Meg and Isabel’s, ‘Uncle Paul,’ was not who he seemed and he went to prison. Now, Mildred is convinced that he is out and about to extract his revenge…. This has unexpectedly shot to one of my top ranking for the wonderful Celia Fremlin, an author seemingly being rediscovered thanks to Faber. The setting is slightly atypical as Fremlin usually specialises in suburban unease - here the families are just as dysfunctional but there is the added fun and hilarity of taking them out of their usual habitat and dumping them down at the seaside complete with 1950s inconveniences (the caravan door that won't open unless you hurl your body at it), unpredictable British weather (rain one minute, hot sunshine the next), sand in the sandwiches... and the hovering spectre of a potential murderer out from a prison sentence and seeking revenge.Mildred has recently left her second husband (again) and taken refuge in a rented cottage on the outskirts of Southcliffe. The issue, which immediately horrified Isabel but somehow entirely escaped Mildred, is that the cottage Mildred is renting is the same property in which she spent her honeymoon with her first husband, the eponymous Uncle Paul. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. The cover looks like the front of an Enid Blyton Famous Five story. The blurb reads like Agatha Christie. The author is billed as ‘Britain’s Patricia Highsmith.’ Which os these was going to be closest to the reality of the book? Turns out, it was a thing all of its own. Fremlin is always wonderful for her acute observations and for the social history embedded in her books and, for the first half, the creepy element felt like an add on to me that rather distracted from all the delights of awkward children (Cedric, the boy who knows everything; Peter and 'sharkie' who lives under the caravan steps), squabbling with fellow guests at a nearby hotel over when to light a fire, and the inevitable colonel who wants to run everything.

Excellent book. Highly recommended for anyone who loves a Christie or a psychological slow burn thriller. Still, as with many authors I like, even a so-so Fremlin is better than a lot of books. I didn't figure out who the culprit was, which was nice, but I also wasn't driven to keep reading as I was withe The Hours Before Dawn and The Jealous One, which is why it took me 2 months to read. Still, nice evocation of a seaside holiday, one much darker than R. C. Sherriff's lovely book, The Fortnight in September! There are some fantastically well-drawn observations, particularly around the child characters. There is Cedric the know-it-all, Peter who insists on everyone who goes up and down the caravan steps paying tribute to 'Sharkey' and Johnny, cheerily oblivious to the tension around him. Even the desperately unravelling Isabel is beautifully caught. As before, some of the dialogue and characters still feel eerily relevant. Still, there are other moments which prove that the past truly is another country where things are done differently. I don't know if I liked this at all. I've recently read her debut novel The Hours Before Dawn, published in 1958. This one, her second novel is also a "domestic noir," published 1959. There are similar elements, the focus on women, very often the drudgery of domestic work; and women's roles as wife and mother. In the 50s there was the fairly rigid separation by gender: men in the work-place and women at home. It was generally younger, un-married women who had jobs - and this is Meg's situation, in her early 20s

Fremlin was an advocate of assisted suicide and euthanasia. In a newspaper interview she admitted to assisting four people to die.[1] In 1983 civil proceedings were brought against her as one of the five members of the EXIT Executive committee which had published “A Guide to Self Deliverance” , but the court refused to declare the booklet unlawful.