A Helping Hand: Celia Dale

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D. James in her writing and next time I read any of her work I will go in with slightly different expectations. Josh and Mai are having a holiday to get over the recent death of Auntie Flo who lived with them, and who left them everything in her will. We meet Josh Evans, cheerfully squalid, with a fondness for ‘busts’ and bikinis; and Maisie, a lifelong nurse, in whose mouth the word ‘dear’ has the ordinary deadliness of a kitchen knife.

Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. Rich, dark and at times funny, this book is a real thriller in the vein of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith and Muriel Spark. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Mrs Fingal, a wealthy widow, finds the couple a refreshing change to her resentful niece and their understanding and sympathy to her situation, her loneliness and need for companionship, makes them the perfect people to look after her.One of the things Dale does so well here is to let the reader in on what the Evanses are up to, slowly but surely as the narrative unfolds.

I really enjoyed the story that is on its face rather benign, following a middle aged English couple and their elderly house guest, but what at first seems ordinary turns quietly horrific as Celia Dale unmasks what is really going on in this quiet suburban home.This story about an elderly lonely widow going to live with a couple who befriend her and who becomes increasingly helpless and isolated as a result of their machinations is well worth reading. Every time the debate around assisted suicide comes up, we hear of the need for firm safeguards to be put in place to actively prevent something akin to this, where family members and ‘carers’ might apply subtle pressure to an elderly or infirm relative to sign away their life. Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall is a great example of this, as is Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water. It all starts well, in high summer, but as the winter draws on the widow loses all agency and ends up being kept in bed all day, unable to do anything for herself. Make mine a third vote for Celia Fremlin, as I, too, thought of her work (read several, but some time ago.

A Helping Hand is a remarkably compelling slice of suburban horror, ideal for fans of Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson – it really is that good.

Originally published in the 1960s "A Helping Hand" was recently reprinted by the publisher and I can see why, as this novel reads like it could have been written yesterday. As Jenn Ashworth’s introduction to this new edition notes, Dale’s novel is tangled in the ‘the cold-blooded economics of care’ and the fact of how ‘easy it is for control to seep into our relations’. Nasty, twisted slice of suburban horror; the horrors lurking beneath a veneer of average suburban living, the evils and subterfuge of marriage, the sickening creepiness of middle-aged men. Line by line, you're entertained by the characters, the setting and the dialogue itself - - but there's that underlying creepiness.