I have, since encountering the work of Charlotte Armstrong, developed a newfound appreciation for the novel of suspense. And so when Kate at Cross-Examining Crime mentioned that The Hours Before Dawn (1958) by Celia Fremlin was among her favourite debuts in the genre, I was willing to put my scepticism aside — Kate and I so rarely agree, y’see — and dive into this lovely Faber & Faber reprint. And, y’know, while it doesn’t completely work for me, this story of a new mother trying to fathom whether she’s being driven slightly mad by the sleeplessness induced by her new son, or whether there’s something more sinister behind the oddnesses she keeps encountering, has a lot to recommend it.

Remove even the considerations of it as a genre novel, and there’s so much here that resonates down the years. For one thing, our protagonist Louise Henderson is so completely awash with contradictory information about the raising of her infant son…

[E]verybody said he was far too old to be needing a night feed. Except, of course, the people who said he was far too young to be denied one.

…that even the experience of having raised two previous children seems meaningless to her. Add to this the stress that baby Michael, waking at 2 a.m. without fail to fuss and fret and noisily make the entire street aware of his presence, is affecting both Louise’s marriage and her relations with her neighbours and you already have a perfect storm. So when an advert for a tenant for their spare room is answered by the prim, sensible-seeming Miss Brandon, surely things can only get better. Right?

It was the same warm, genuine sorrow that an author can feel for his heroine when he is about to plunge her into yet worse disaster.

There’s a knowledge of motherhood here captured as painfully and beautifully as Joanna Wallace did recently in The Dead Friend Project (2024), with the two older Henderson children being in no way mere scamps and moppets, but genuine little people who come with all that is joyous and infuriating about them (when one of them asks “Which Caterpillar?” you want to laugh and scream at the same time). That Louise loves her family and is trying to do the best by them is beyond question (“Odd that she should be staring thus, with something near to worship, at her tormentor of so many nights.”), but Fremlin does a wonderful job of emphasising the sharp edges that come with this sort of life (and, let’s face it, Louise’s husband Paul is a bit of a dick, which hardly helps).

Alongside this downtrodden, isolating parable of a marriage going stale and a woman driven to distraction trying to make everything work for everyone, Fremlin includes some savage stabs of the blackest comedy (“This seemed to Louise a rather tame sort of moral to be drawn from such a horrific experience…”) to keep the reader engaged, showing the life that existed within this woman before her efforts wrung her so completely dry. It’s rather sad that so much of the compromise Louise has to manufacture feels so true nearly 70 years later (“Hurting someone’s feelings was so often the quickest thing to do — the shortest route from one task to the next.”) and the commentary on what is expected of “up-do-date mothers” would be rightfully praised if written this year.

The plot, such as it is, then, takes a little while to come in, but makes itself felt in moments that really did cut me to the core (the final line of chapter 13 hits with a real jolt). And I can fault it only in that the necessary narrative shove to explain everything rings rather false in the detail-rich, quotidian world Fremlin has so acutely built up. When such subtle, sustained work is done in communicating Louise’s wildly fluctuation states of mind (“To learn that you are being an utter fool can sometimes be very comforting…”) and making her life seem so very lived, having a chapter of info-dumping plot propulsion is, alas, not quite in keeping with the brilliance shown in every other aspect.

As a portrait of the strains put on marriage, of the joy and vexation of children (I love one of the older girls declaring their inability to get to sleep “with a smug, trump-that-if-you-can sort of air”), of the importance of human connection, and of the madness that can lurk below even the most benign exteriors, The Hours Before Dawn is exemplary, and comes recommended as a curiously enjoyable time for all the sense of exhaustion and bewilderment it so effectively conveys. I was pulled through it in under a day, burned up with avidity to find out what lay in store for these very real fictional people, and it will live a long time in my memory for all the honesty on display. If it suffers a bit in plotting, well, sometimes an author can only summon up 90% of a masterpiece, and we’ll just have to live with that.

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See also

Kate @ Cross-Examining Crime: The speed at which peculiar events occur is just right. It is not too fast that the ending is quickly deduced, but nor is it too slow that you think it is all a figment of Louise’s imagination. The speed is of that murky middle ground where the evidence can go either way, leaving Louise in a state of doubting herself and her own sanity.

Ali @ HeavenAli: There are several things that Fremlin does really well. We see everything from Louise’s perspective, and the reader is never sure how reliable her view of things is. She portrays the world of an exhausted young mother to perfection, this is no advertisement for 1950s domestic harmony, and the reader feels Louise’s frustrated exhaustion as her baby continues to scream throughout the night. Gradually, Fremlin winds up the tension creating a wonderfully suspenseful atmosphere throughout the novel. None of this detracts from some excellent characterisation – from the annoying Mrs Hooper and her spy obsessed son to Louise’s perfectly groomed mother-in-law – who prefers to keep her grandchildren at a distance, Fremlin uses a sharp and observant eye.