Mistletoe Malice by Kathleen Farrell review a snarky stocking filler

This witty postwar classic about a terrible family Christmas raises a bitter cocktail to the festive season

When the “old” and “tottering” widow Rachel – she is in her late 60s – hosts Christmas at her Sussex seaside home, comfort and joy fail to show. This acidic novel, first published in 1951, tackles an important subject to which many modern readers will relate: the murderous claustrophobia of a family Christmas. It is also a novel about post-second world war Britain: the nostalgia, grimness and traumatic memories, the fear – of nuclear annihilation and shifting gender roles – and the desperate hopes of this shaken land.

The setup is gorgeously Agatha Christie, with a nod to the locked-room mystery as disparate family members gather in a large and draughty house. It is Christmas Eve and the house belongs to the tyrannical matriarch Rachel. She is bitter, nostalgic and prone to lashing out at her “limply resigned” niece, Bess, who is over 30 – a fatal age for a single woman – and has spent her adult life as Rachel’s unpaid companion. These two are joined first by “spitfire” cousin Kate, Bess’s age, a cocktail-drinking ball of rage in red lipstick who is also single, but lives and works in London. Rachel’s overbearing middle-aged daughter, Marion, arrives next with her pallid husband, Thomas, who mostly hovers, waiting for instructions, and then the rakish nephew Piers. A narcissist with one eye on his inheritance, Piers takes sadistic pleasure in raising and dashing Bess’s desperate hopes of marriage. Finally, Rachel’s son, Adrian, appears very late, straight from Italy, with a skinful, in an inappropriately colourful suit. Since he was last seen several years previously, extorting money out of everyone for a fake business, his reception is as bitter as the coastal winter weather.

There is no plot beyond personality clashes, revelations of misery or delusion, and a growing mutual loathing. The not inconsiderable pleasure comes from Farrell’s eye for the absurd, her talent for a well-placed detail, and her feminist take on gender roles. Some of these, depressingly, wouldn’t feel far off the mark today. At one point Kate is drunkenly admonishing Piers for his sexist attitudes. “Piers, who had been looking at her, rather than following her argument, thought that she was attractive in a peculiar … ”

There is a definite whiff of Barbara Pym or even Muriel Spark about all this. Rachel is a particularly Sparkean character – lonely, viperous, pettily unhinged. Snarking conversations and the occasional outright row unfold over cocktails, grey meals and desperate cliffside outings; physical violence erupts briefly, unsatisfactorily. The novel falls a bit short with Adrian, who seems woefully underused. Initially, he looks set to be a brilliant disruptor, but he fails to take up space, as if Farrell could not quite decide what to do with him. Hints about his sexuality, though, convey the deep, sad shame associated with homosexuality in the 1950s.

Kathleen Farrell sounds marvellous. She set up a literary agency in postwar London, was friends with writers including Spark, Stevie Smith and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and wrote four more novels. Mistletoe Malice – the dire and belittling title was imposed by Faber at the time – was well received, but not a big seller. It deserves to be reread. It is intelligent and witty, but – and perhaps this was an issue at the time – not quite Spark or Pym. For that, there would need to be more control over the timing of tensions and denouements, more compassion or – conversely – more disturbing menace and oddness. It would make a great stocking filler, though: a smart, bah-humbug reminder that It’s a Wonderful Life was delusional, even at the time.

Mistletoe Malice by Kathleen Farrell is published by Faber (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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