Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl's Court (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The American composer Stephen Sondheim has cited Bernard Herrmann's score for Hangover Square as a major influence on his musical Sweeney Todd. [7] Reception [ edit ] First edition. Octavo. pp [x], 356, [2] adverts. One of the great British novels of the mid-century.Small (ink?) spot to rear cover. Head and tail of spine slightly rubbed. Titles on spine a bit faded. Very good. No dustwrapper. The repetition might seem heavy-handed, but it attests to Hamilton’s rare ability to conjure atmosphere. You’re there with him, surveying a scene no less hectic than Hogarth’s Gin Lane. And, as with that picture, despair lurks too. In Hamilton-land, there’s always a need for one more round, the better to anaesthetise the anxiety besetting what the author Michael Holroyd calls “London’s defeated classes – the insignificant, the needy, the homeless and the ostracised”. published in London Fictions, Five Leaves: 2013, and posted here in October 2016; minor reformatting January 2018]

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton - AbeBooks Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton - AbeBooks

One of Hamilton’s biographers, Sean French, suggests that the novelist locates Netta’s flat at exactly the spot of his life-changing road accident - at the junction of Logan Place and Earl’s Court Road. Logan Place has been redeveloped, but Lexham Gardens just across the road is largely untouched, terraces of tall late Victorian or Edwardian town houses, now comfortable flats. 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. Yeah, it could've been great, Pat. It probably would've been. But patience is never one of my virtues, and this is an especially bad week.The time line of the story is a bit relative, yet it fits the novel. You read fist chapter and then after a few chapters you see another "first chapter" and before you start saying ‘wtf’ just remember that you kind of have to connect some things for yourself. More than once in the novel, you will have some connecting to do. However, it is not difficult to do it. Why must he kill Netta? Because things had been going on too long, and he must get to Maidenhead and be peaceful and contented again. And why Maidenhead? Because he had been happy there with his sister, Ellen. They had had a splendid fortnight there, and she had died a year or so later. He would go on the river again, and be at peace. … But first of all he had to kill Netta.

Hangover Square, First Edition: Books - AbeBooks Hangover Square, First Edition: Books - AbeBooks

He was the author of 11 more novels, and penned two substantial hit plays, Rope and Gaslight, which enjoyed successful lives on screen too. This of course prompts the question, who is “you”? Trying to answer this will lead us to understand just how original a novelist Hamilton is. Much fiction of the 1930s, especially that written from what can be called a radical left-wing perspective, endorses a kind of drab socialist realism. It is manacled to a heavy weight of exact description, of individuals and their circumstances. It’s not so much mass as massy observation. At its best, which is probably Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man, such observation is redeemed from tedium by an account of particular lives which through sheer accumulation of details gives a sense of the actuality of day-to-day existence. At its worst, it’s a bit like being button-holed by the pub bore determined to tell you in remorseless detail about how he found true love and saved the world. There is a bit of Bone in most of us. I completely identified with this weak and forlorn man, unable to survive in an increasingly cruel world. Netta is supposed to represent the fascists (in fact Hamilton blatantly describes her as one) for whom cruelty is a way of life. While Bone recognizes what Netta really stands for, he is unable to tear himself away from her insidious allure. 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.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.

Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton

Hangover Square is the Ally Sheedy kind of book. It's not at all what I would expect to like. It's essentially the story of a mentally ill, alcoholic loser named George Harvey Bone, who lives a lonely, desperate life in London (just before WWII), aided only by the fellowship of a few other very nasty alcoholics who delight in using and abusing him. Generally, I've pretty much exhausted my taste for Alcoholic Literature of the British Isles since I took that Irish Literature class in college. (Ireland needs some more literary subjects besides alcoholism, poverty, and religious enmity. Maybe a book about a talking dog or something.)

Set in 1930s London, Hamilton offers us a bleak view of the lower classes, the drunks, the unemployed and the shiftless, written in engaging prose that may be some of the finest writing I've encountered in quite some time. While his grasp of the facts about schizophrenia may not be completely accurate, he still manages to capture George's descent into madness with a nightmarish quality that rings true, not to mention his ability to transport readers to the less savory side of Earl's Court as war looms on the horizon. The hero and the book's main sufferer is George 'Bone', hopelessly obsessed with a failed actress Netta and on a self-destructive path. The whole book takes places on the eve of World War II and could easily be interpreted as a metaphor of the rise of fascism with Bone possibly representing the United Kingdom, forced to enter the war – that’s an interpretation my Book Club came up with, granted we were on our own drinking binge in one of the Earl’s Court pubs, so we could’ve been talking nonsense at that point. Nonetheless the atmosphere of impending catastrophe is definitely discernible in the book.