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Uncle Paul: Welcome to the Nightmare Summer Holiday

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With Paul possibly released from prison, could increasingly spooky happenings indicate his presence and increasing danger for the trio? It all comes to a glorious climax which is, arguably, more 'psychological' than some of Fremlin's later books. Meg joins them on holiday by the sea, where Mildred is staying in the cottage where she found out her husband, Paul, had tried to murder his first wife over fifteen years ago.

Both Mildred and Isabel seem to think that Paul is now out of prison and coming for revenge on one or all of the sisters who caused his incarceration. And the doubts about Philip and Freddy are brilliantly handled, especially when it’s so difficult to guess how old they are! In a spooky coincidence - or is it - said cottage turns out to be the same one that Mildred rented during a holiday fifteen years before, her ill-fated honeymoon to the titular Paul, a man who was shortly afterwards arrested for the attempted murder of his first wife. 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.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. 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.

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. 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.Before she goes, she tells her boyfriend; the irresponsible, irrepressible, Freddy, that she is leaving. Meg learns to be more accepting of the perspective of others; to not dismiss the silliness of women, who don't have good vocabs and rational faculties. First published in 1959 and recently reissued by Faber, Uncle Paul was Fremlin’s second book, and what a brilliant novel it is – a wonderfully clever exploration of what can happen when we allow our imagination to run wild and unfettered, conjuring up all sorts of nightmare scenarios from our fears and suspicions. And all to no purpose, for nothing had happened—nothing had ever been going to happen; it had all been in Mildred’s imagination.

In the belief that Mildred would be far better off virtually anywhere else than in an isolated cottage with no amenities, Meg persuades her half-sister to move into a local hotel, a delightfully old-fashioned place with an odd assortment of guests. 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. The central protagonist is Meg, who, despite being the youngest sister is easily the most level-headed of the three.Meg has a sister, Isabel, plus an older, half-sister, Mildred, who looked after her, after her mother’s death.

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