Holiday

Edwin Fisher, a university lecturer, returns alone to the east coast seaside town where his family took holidays when he was a boy, and books into a boarding house. His marriage to Meg has broken down, a child has died, and he has come to do nothing in particular. Then he discovers that his parents-in-law are also in town, which is either coincidence or an ambush arranged by his father-in-law, a bluff and successful local businessman who intends to see the marriage repaired and does not much care what Fisher thinks. Around this Middleton assembles the ordinary furniture of an English seaside week: the pier, the deckchairs, the boarding-house dining room, the fellow guests, the brass band, a woman with a child on the beach, and a great many long conversations conducted just to the side of the subject. Fisher is bright, prickly and thoroughly evasive about his own part in the failure. The novel refuses every opportunity for drama and is exactly as quiet as it sounds, which is the achievement: a precise and slightly bleak account of an ordinary man deciding, over a fortnight, whether to go back.