Uncle Paul

Posted by Verity on October 23, 2023 in Book review, Humour, Nostalgia | 2 comments

Celia Fremlin, Faber

The woman on the radio was quite unequivocal: Uncle Paul was the scariest thriller she had ever read, and Celia Fremlin, who published it in 1959, had been unjustly consigned to oblivion. Well, there’s nothing we like better than truffling out dames who have suffered this fate, and when I then saw Uncle Paul as the centrepiece of Waterstones’ window – their book of the week – I had to read it.

The story concerns three very different sisters (one is in fact a half-sister) who find themselves in the holiday resort of their younger years. The oldest is visiting it just as her murderous ex-husband is about to be released from jail, and her half-sisters are desperate to protect her from the retribution he might inflict on her in return for her betrayal.

It’s a tantalising premise made all the more alluring by its location in a genteel seaside town on the South Coast, where we are treated to the full range of leisure experiences on offer, from the grand hotel on the promenade to the caravan site on the sands, via end-of-the-pier entertainment. ‘Welcome to the nightmare summer holiday’ blares the book’s cover. To my mind, we’re confronted with that long before anything gets scary: scatty sister Isabel is cooped up with two young sons in a tiny caravan in the pouring rain, with the imminent arrival of their picky stepfather a source of terror nearly as frightening as a vengeful ex-con.

The three children who have bit parts in the drama are well drawn, with the tyranny of the toddler a running gag throughout the book: Meg soon realises the mistake she’s made in entertaining Peter with the suggestion that there is a shark under the caravan steps: ‘Would a more experienced aunt, she wondered, have realised at once that this momentary inspiration for keeping her nephew amused would have this prolonged and wearisome aftermath? That Sharkey, in the form of a battered twist of plastic clothes line, would dwell forever more beneath those steps, and demand his tribute of hollow cries and simulated terror?’

Uncle Paul deploys the classic thriller tropes of sharing the clues to ‘who is doing it’ among several suspects, and setting up a sequence of sinister events that later turn out to have innocent explanations. The isolated cottage that is the setting for most of the suspense – it would win few endorsements on Airbnb – is no longer the idyllic hideaway for Meg’s memory, and her nights of horror in a chilly bedroom are powerfully written: ‘The chill, motionless quality of the air struck her, as always, on entering the room, but tonight there seemed – or was it her imagination? – some indefinably different quality to it. Was it warner? Or colder? Or was it some scent? A scent neither pleasant nor unpleasant; too faint, indeed, to describe at all, and yet different; and unspeakably alien.’

So why is Uncle Paul ultimately unsatisfying as a thriller? For a start, the premise that it relies on is utterly preposterous, and then the chill factor fails to build – in part because there is so much humour in the book.

If you want an amusing picture of middle-class English people in all their glorious eccentricity weathering the discomforts of a seaside holiday in the 1950s, this is the book for you. If you want to be scared out of your wits, read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.