Uncle Paul: Welcome to the Nightmare Summer Holiday

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Like Shirley Jackson, she can easily slip between the domestic every day and an air of unease and foreboding. 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.

And as with Taylor's novels that sense of the Victorian era - how else to explain the several anecdotes from an elderly lady in her button-up boots. On the surface, Uncle Paul could be the relatively innocent story of three sisters getting caught up in troublesome domestic matters during a seaside holiday. In the 50s there was the fairly rigid separation by gender: men in the work-place and women at home. It’s quite a short book and although not that much happens along the way I found myself really wanting to know what happens but it’s not till towards the end of the book does the pace quicken and everything falls into place. It starts with sensible Meg receiving a message from older sister (and often overwrought), Isabel about a problem with their half-sister, Mildred.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.

It all comes to a glorious climax which is, arguably, more 'psychological' than some of Fremlin's later books. Author Celia Fremlin received an Edgar Award for her suspenseful debut novel, The Hours Before Dawn.

And the doubts about Philip and Freddy are brilliantly handled, especially when it’s so difficult to guess how old they are! It’s exactly what I said—now she’s back in the comforts of civilisation, she can’t be bothered any more with footsteps and shadows from the past. It’s all very dated too – which, duh, this is a novel originally published in the 1950s, but I found it unpleasant, especially Meg’s boyfriend Freddy (presented as a charming cad, reads as a bully) and the laid-on-thick ageism towards Mildred (who can’t be more than 40!