FIt can be challenging to follow up a surprise success like Clare Chambers’ 2020 novel Small Pleasures. Chambers was published regularly but quietly, and then it took nearly a decade for this groundbreaking ninth novel to become a critical and word-of-mouth hit. This quietly dazzling work was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and rightly recognized as a minor masterpiece.

Her tenth novel, Shy Creatures, confirms her as one of our most talented writers. It treads somewhat in the territory of Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor, positioning her outside contemporary fashions, though it has echoes of Tessa Hadley and Sarah Waters. Returning to the profoundly mid-century English suburbia that Small Pleasures is set in, Shy Creatures is also inspired by a true event, and is sometimes slower-paced but just as quirky, sharply observed and beautifully written as its predecessor.

Helen Hansford is an art therapist in a Croydon psychiatric hospital, in an era of narcotics and more progressive approaches. Here she teaches “her favourite group of the week – male alcoholics”. She also has an affair with the charismatic, anti-establishment psychiatrist Dr Gil Rudden, who is distantly related to her through his wife.

Helen’s life plods along unwisely, vacillating between occasional romantic flights of fancy – “delighting in the very fact of each other’s existence” – and the indignities of being a mistress. Then the hospital gets a call about an altercation in a nearby abandoned house. Enter an unkempt mute with waist-length hair and a beard. William Tapping, 37 and barely at school, has spent his life virtually isolated from civilization and undocumented among elderly aunts, in a situation of secluded paranoia that the reader cannot yet understand.

Helen devotes an impressive amount of time and attention to her patient, and the “hidden man” begins to show his artistic talent. She soon embarks on a search for his past as an amateur detective. Through phone conversations and meetings with people from William’s past life, she begins to understand what caused his trauma, while reflecting on her own mistakes. The narrative goes back from 1964 to 1960 and, interlaced with present events, moves through the previous two decades until it lands in 1938, when all is revealed.

Chambers is a fine historian, but the earlier flashbacks, which document William’s life of poverty and depression with eccentric aunts, build slowly and, for all their quiet irony and accurately portrayed despair, can be overloaded with historical detail. This is a grim world of kidney pudding, camphor and the threat of juvenile detention. But even in these more static passages, Chambers’ exquisite prose is a consistent delight, while the sharpness of her observation has beauty and universality. As we begin to understand the details of a childhood spent fearing “the authorities,” the pace picks up again and the mystery cries out to be solved.

In 1964, Helen’s teenage relative Lorraine ends up as a patient in the hospital, and the dangerous influence of charmer Gil, who is an enlightened psychiatrist, on women becomes increasingly clear. While Helen withdraws, Gil does more than encourage the young, mentally ill Lorraine, stroking his ego with her infatuation. Focusing on her protégé rather than her former lover, Helen discovers that William had once tasted freedom while vacationing at the country home of a family named Kenley, after which a terrible event had taken place involving William and his best friend Francis Kenley. Helen manages to track down Francis, who offers hope on several levels, and his mother Marion, a truly inspirational figure. The revelations about William thicken.

The accuracy of Chambers’s powers of observation can be almost uncanny, particularly her descriptions of human emotion. Helen’s mother unleashes “a wave of guilt, swiftly followed by a counter-wave of resentment.” Marital strife involves “an exchange of low-level nagging and whining.” One voice is “bright with swallowed disappointment.” Even beneath her most melancholy evocations, black humor rumbles; irony and compassion run through her portraits of repressed lives that finally shimmer with some hope of liberation. The novel’s ending is subtle but complete and endlessly moving.