Hamilton treats us to different points of view. We get the perspective of two well wishers of Bone, who have a great time drinking with him at bars. They are kind to Bone, whom they recognize as a genuinely good person but also terribly weak and prone to getting hurt.

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on 3rd reading I've realized this is a really, really good character study. The plot is only there to facilitate character developement, it's very obvious but when I first read this I didn't understand why it blew my mind. Lately I've come to realize that all my favourites are like this lol In 2010, British label Chandos released a CD including a 17-minute concert suite from Hangover Square, assembled by Stephen Hogger. The film's musical tour de force is a sonata movement for piano and orchestra in the Lisztian style (in which the scherzo and adagio movements, which are typical as succeeding movements in a concerto, are compressed and presented in place of a central development). Slightly revised by the composer in 1973 for Charles Gerhardt's RCA film music series and retitled "Concerto Macabre," it has been recorded by RCA, Naïve, Koch and Naxos, in addition to the recording paired with Hogger's suite. Except for the RCA releases, all of the recordings of the concerto rely on a version edited in 1992 by Christopher Husted. The disc also includes Hogger's extended suite based on Herrmann's incidental music for Citizen Kane (1941).

I am not going to recommend this book to everyone. It is dark. It is sad, but it also realistically shows a good person suffering under a mental disability. The Midnight Bell (1929) is based upon Hamilton's falling in love with a prostitute, and was later published along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) as the semi-autobiographical trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky (1935).

Hangover Square - Wikipedia

Netta herself is sexually attracted to the fascist movement and its fetishistic totems: “She liked the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots, the swastikas, the shirts.” The political is contiguous with the personal. Her coarseness, her casual duplicity, her contempt for the weak and helpless – if Netta is not an actual fascist, she is a spiritual adherent, a ruthless foe of all that is decent and gentle and cultured. As George, in his abjection, pleads with her: “Can’t you be civil? Can’t you look at me and say something civil?” However, when George is having his dead moods he doesn’t just switch off, he becomes a whole other person. Even he hasn’t realised that he has a split personality. And this other George Bone is a more decisive and angrier individual, and has geared his mind towards nothing else but killing Netta Longdon. It’s a world which Hamilton – who died of cirrhosis of the liver aged 58 in 1962 - knew at first hand. He started drinking heavily and regularly circa 1927, while in his twenties - haunting pubs in Earl’s Court, Chelsea, Soho and around Euston Road. The book is filled with male homo social desire. All the men (except for Bone and Netta's fascist lover Peter) get along well with each other. Was Hamilton suggesting that Bone would have been better off hanging out with the guys? It is while drinking with the guys that Bone has the most fun in the novel. While his courtship of Netta simply leads to one humiliation after the other.

To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. It’s possible, I suppose, to interpret Bone’s response to Chamberlain’s words as prompted by King Street (the CP headquarters) which, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on 23rd August, took the line that the war against Hitler was an Imperialist one and should be ignored by Marxists. But in his biography, Nigel Jones says that Hamilton never accepted this line and was, for all his Communist sympathies, Churchillian in his patriotism. Not that Jones has anything to say about this moment. My own view is that Bone is understandably irked by Chamberlain’s routine piety. Anyway, by his double murder he has brought speedy destruction on the basically rotten life of which he had for too long been a part and which now requires his own death. For suddenly death is everywhere. New York Review of Books: "When Hamilton's work is at its best, his preoccupations—consciousness, power, obsession, sex, and social class—converge, and their combined weight gives the fiction a momentum that moves it above the sooty streets of Earl's Cour He has suffered these mental wipe-outs since boyhood, but lately they have been getting worse. Single, lonely, a depressed wanderer through the twilit seediness of Earl’s Court, George survives on a private income that fatally allows him to numb his wretchedness with drink. Hangover Square is a metaphorical place, a stopover on the long and lonely pub-crawl to alcoholic oblivion That said, who exactly is George Harvey Bone? Or to put the question differently: why does Hamilton make this amiable, ineffective, insecure, warm-hearted but hapless man the protagonist of his novel? George of England, but apparently no slayer of dragons. This George is more of a Dobbin. In some respects he is quite like George Bowling, the protagonist of ‘George Orwell’s’ almost exact contemporary Coming Up For Air. I put Orwell’s name in quotes merely to remind us that Eric Blair’s choice of pseudonym has surely to be read as a token of his desire to be a kind of spokesman for England. George speaks for itself. And Orwell is the name of a small river that runs into the sea near Southwold, where Eric Blair’s parents retired after years in the Colonial Service. The opening of Hangover Square is set at Hunstanton, Christmas time 1938, where George is staying at the house of an aged aunt. Same sea-coast, though this time Norfolk rather than Suffolk. But neither, surely, much to do with England in the late 1930s.

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To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. In The Slaves of Solitude, his 1947 evocation of wartime suburban England – modelled on Henley - a meek secretary, Miss Roach, is bullied on a daily basis at her lodging house by a typical Hamiltonian monster – the Nazi-sympathising Mr Thwaites who has “the steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly’s wing”. After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as Rope's End in America). These lines (1679-1684) are spoken by the Chorus near the end of Milton’s great work, after Samson has pulled down the temple, in the process killing both himself and the Philistines to whom he has for years been hostage, ‘Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with Slaves’. Betrayed into captivity by his passion for Dalilah, he now avenges himself on her and the society she serves. From now on, Hamilton will supply further epigraphs from Milton’s work to each Part of Hangover Square. The Tenth and final Part begins with Samson’s own words to the Philistines he has been summoned to entertain, as reported by the messenger at lines 1640-1645:He seized hold of her ankles firmly and hauled them up in the air with his great strength, his great golfer’s wrists. Then he grasped both of her legs in one arm, and with the other held her, unstruggling, under water. And in a display of what may be God-given strength he then buries himself and them. This isn’t to say that we should regard Bone as a Miltonic hero. The whole point is that, unlike Samson, Bone is not exceptional. Hamilton’s regard for his protagonist, while genuine, has a sardonic edge to it. To be sure, as Empson would have said, a question hovers over Samson’s final act: was it justifiable or a vain-glorious gesture. Did he save or damn himself? But this isn’t what Hamilton has in mind.

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton | Goodreads

What I did notice is that there is something nomadic about it, the "atmosphere of homeless" (as it is described in the introduction to the novel), the feeling of desperate desire to get away, of someone trying to escape... Such was the novel's success that it was rapidly adapted for a film which was released in 1945. Starring Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell, and George Sanders, significant changes to the novel were made, most notably the plot's re-location to the Edwardian era. As you read over and over again about the same mistakes, you don't really get bored (or I didn't) because the story doesn't lose its interest. Maybe there is something universal about suffering that makes it such a fascinating read. This novel is definitely full of pain and desperation. Although I cannot say that I sympathized with the protagonist in the sense I really connected to him on an emotional level, I have to say that I did feel for him. Moreover, I really enjoyed reading this novel and the fact that he was well portrayed certainly played a part in that. He was walking along the front at Brighton, in the sombre early dawn, in the deep blue cloudy not-quite-night, and it had happened again… We are, in many ways, made to almost want George to get revenge and murder the awful people who use and abuse him. On the one hand, there's a certain delight to be had in these bullies coming to a messy end; on the other, George essentially stalks and harasses a woman who has made it clear she isn't interested, and then proceeds to try and murder her. There's a tempting feminist perspective essay right there.Parts of the story are unfortunately autobiographical. Hamilton himself was an alcoholic, turning to drink after becoming disfigured in a car accident. J.B. Priestley described him "as an unhappy man who needed whiskey like a car needed petrol." He was also known to have been a stalker of the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald and the character of Netta is said to be based on her. She was completely, indeed sinisterly devoid of all those qualities which her face and body externally proclaimed her to have - pensiveness, grace, warmth, agility, beauty ... Her thoughts resembled those of a fish..". I once wrote a review for this one and I thought the best way to describe this novel would be by calling it ‘A diary of obsession’ because simply that was the first thing that came to my mind at the time. Today I’m not so sure because it feels like more than that. Certainly obsession plays an important part in it, but isn’t it also about other things? About what happens with the person obsessed? Does it not also explore what happens with the person who is the object of obsession? Doesn’t it propose some interesting question? It certainly does and it got me thinking at the time. Who is the real victim? What are dynamics of such a relationship and how do they affect the persons involved? Moreover, the question of other people comes in. Our protagonist and the girl he is head over heels with are not the only characters in this novel. Now the first book in his great trilogy about 1930s Soho and its environs – Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky – has been adapted by the award-winning choreographer Matthew Bourne for a show - The Midnight Bell - that is touring the UK until late November. a b c Mank, Gregory William (2018). Laird Cregar: A Hollywood Tragedy. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-2844-8.