I social order had collapsed by the time Compton-Burnett came to write about it after the Second World War, but since no intimations of the future ever come into her work, in contrast to the sinister harbingers that appear in the daily life of Mrs. Dalloway, say, the novel is utterly without anachronism. Compton-Burnett all is completely explicit. It is not events but words that fascinate her. A peculiar property of mind that she allows most of her characters is extreme literalness. In order to avoid the actual significance of a statement, people are taken to mean exactly what they say.
Language is deployed to conceal or ignore the implications of what the characters have said.
There is no hyperbole and no understatement. When Horace understands that his sons may have wanted him to fall into the chasm, there follows the sort of explicit confrontation that could be written by almost no one but Compton-Burnett. Your being different for a little while has not altered all that went before. Nothing can alter it. If it had not been for Mother, we would rather have been dead.