Book Review (holiday reads #7): THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN by Celia Fremlin

Title: The Hours Before Dawn

Author: Celia Fremlin
Publisher: Faber Faber
Read: September 2018

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

If you went on neglecting your own tastes like this, did you, in the end, cease to have any tastes? Cease, in fact, to be a person at all, and become merely a labour-saving gadget around the house?

Book Description:

Winner of the 1960 Edgar Award for best mystery novel

Louise would give anything - anything - for a good night's sleep. Forget the girls running errant in the garden and bothering the neighbours. Forget her husband who seems oblivious to it all. If the baby would just stop crying, everything would be fine.

Or would it? What if Louise's growing fears about the family's new lodger, who seems to share all of her husband's interests, are real? What could she do, and would anyone even believe her? Maybe, if she could get just get some rest, she'd be able to think straight.

In a new edition of this lost classic, The Hours Before Dawn proves - scarily - as relevant to readers today as it was when Celia Fremlin first wrote it in the 1950s.

My musings:

Domestic noir, when done well, is one of my favourite genres, one that has the potential to cut especially deep when the dangers lurking are those surrounding us in our daily lives. Whilst this genre seems to have become increasingly popular over the last decade, it is by no means a new concept  – as this book proves. Written in the 1950’s, it made for a truly refreshing read that took me on a special kind of time travel. Celia Fremlin, I learned, worked for the Mass Observation Movement during WWII, skills which stood her in good stead when she took to writing novels about ordinary women of her time caught up in frightening situations. Her writing style, full of small, telling details and characters that seem to leap from the page, is both vivid and engaging and full of tongue-in-cheek humour that mocks the gender division so “normal” at the time.

Here we have Louise, a young mother of two small children and a new baby, who struggles through her days in a fog of sleep deprivation from having to tend to her son several times per night. Her husband, who returns from work expecting a cooked dinner, a clean house and well behaved children, also demands that he – the man of the house – get a good night sleep, which sees Louise feed her baby downstairs in the kitchen or laundry for fear of waking him. Of course he cannot be expected to help out with menial tasks such as lending a hand with any form of housework, or looking after the children, so Louise gradually becomes more and more exhausted. When the family take in a lodger to help with finances, strange things are starting to happen in the house, but it seems that Louise is the only one who notices that something is amiss. Soon she is convinced that there is something fishy going on with their tenant – but is it all in her mind?

I simply loved the glimpses Fremlin offers into the daily lives of women of her era, so vividly portrayed here. Everyone seems genuine and relatable, from the busybody neighbour next door who regularly complains about the children’s noise, to the friend who imposes on Louise to do her favours (which she never returns), and lots of the other side characters who lend a dimension to the story that showcases Fremlin’s skill as a writer. I loved the way she not only manages to build tension by airing Louise’s growing suspicions, but also sow doubt in the reader’s mind how reliable the sleep deprived Louise is as a narrator. Thus combining all the elements that usually make for a clever psychological thriller, Fremlin creates a timeless story that is still relevant in our times today. I, for one, loved the opportunity to get an insight into Fremlin’s era and be truly chilled to the core at the same time. A lot of modern mysteries could take a leaf out of Fremlin’s book on how to create a timeless story of suspense. I was instantly drawn in and devoured it greedily to the end. Highly recommended to lovers of the genre!