Uncle Paul: Welcome to the Nightmare Summer Holiday

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Throughout the narrative, you keep wondering if anything is indeed happening or if our characters are ‘just’ somehow paranoiac, imagining threat where there is none. It was a bit slow and I didn't identify with any of the main characters in the way that I did in her other 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.

These two sisters confront the fact that in the past they had feelings for a certain Uncle Paul - who was sent to prison for bigamy and the murder of his first wife - it's on the back cover! Yes, that cover art totally caught my eye :O) That and the fact that Waterstone’s Books of the Month can sometimes have some lovely gems.

I was very satisfied with the ending, which I guessed, but not until I was a good way in, and other possibilities seemed to be exhausted. Once again, this allows Fremlin to prey on her protagonists’ anxieties as Meg oscillates between fearing for her life and thinking the whole Mildred situation is absurd!Meg, the only sensible sister and main narrator, is confused about the time of day upon waking to bright sunshine. I made the mistake of reading into the wee hours, and I decided to go to bed after finishing chapter 18. Fremlin breeds monsters from the minutiae of life and shows how lack of love and loneliness can cause them . For myself the entertainment rested on Fremlin's children - a classic 50s child, Cedric, who manages on most occasions to outsmart the adults, and Isabel's two small boys, doing precisely child-like things, with a vivid sense of children's self-focus. Now, fifteen years on, Mildred is worried that Paul may be out of prison and looking to take his revenge – especially when she hears strange footsteps scuffling around the cottage in the middle of the night!

Guy has been doing some Celia Fremlin reviews lately and I have been trying to get The Parasite Person.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.