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

Product Information

The book is set in London at the start of the Second World War in 1939. The setting moves to Brighton and Maidenhead too. Infatuation, unrequited love and the world of the screen and film crowd color the book.

Hangover Square (film) - Wikipedia Hangover Square (film) - Wikipedia

For want of anything better to say about this quite remarkable classic of pre-war English literature I shall quote Keith Waterhouse, "you can almost smell the gin." In the year preceding Chamberlain's declaration of war George Harvey Bone is loafing about Earl's Court, mooning over a complete bitch and driving himself to an alcoholic rage. Hamilton is famous for his use of slang and conversational tone and ability to evoke his chosen location, notably the London pub, and I certainly wouldn't find myself disagreeing with that assessment. Hamilton's ability to write believably from both aspects of a schizophrenic personality is the most enjoyable and impressive aspect for me, the final chapters causing a torrent of conflicting emotional reactions.Maybe I couldn't feel deeply sorry for George because he is so full of self-piety...or because he has fallen so low. Still, it was really fascinating to read about him. George seems to be this novel, meaning that it feels like his diary, an exploration of his soul. I won’t idolize George. As I said, I liked the fact he felt so real. Perhaps too flawed as a person to love, but so well written as a character that it was impossible not to get caught up in the story.

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

Chapter four where he analyses Netta is so good I had to listen to it three times. What a masterpiece Which is Hamilton’s point. Or rather, because novels don’t exist to make a point, it’s what we can infer from all that Hamilton shows us. George’s aunt embodies old-style decencies. Her washed-out kindliness is a world away from the rootless, amoral decadence of Hangover Square. Bone belongs to the Square but he is not really of it. At the beginning of the novel we are even told that he would prefer to be a countryman. ‘He wanted a cottage in the country – yes, a good old cottage in the country – and he wanted Netta as his wife. No children, just Netta – and to live with her happily and quietly ever afterwards.’ In your dreams, as the saying goes.Laird Cregar, a fan of the original novel, encouraged 20th Century Fox to buy the film rights. Fox agreed, but wanted to recreate the success that it had enjoyed the previous year with The Lodger, and made several changes to the story, including the main character's personality and the setting. Cregar, George Sanders and John Brahm, who had all worked together in The Lodger, signed on with the project. Set principally in Earls Court and Brighton on the eve of WWII and first published in 1941 the book captures I feel (before my time though!) the smells, sights and sounds of the time; in particular British drinking culture – as the title might imply! In Rope (1929), much admired by Harold Pinter, two young murderers conduct a dinner party with the friends and family of their victim, whose corpse lies in the chest they’re eating from. She sang, “I Love the Moon …” At the end of her song she said, “Thank you, Mr BBC. Good night and God bless you …” Miss Fields will leave for Capri today. It is expected …

Patrick Hamilton: the tormented genius whose play inspired Patrick Hamilton: the tormented genius whose play inspired

Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work. This pertains to all the authors of the piece, their spouses or partners. 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. You can’t say that he’s forgotten. And in some ways, he’s more ubiquitous than ever – the much-used phrase “gaslighting” derives from the subtly destructive mind-games conducted by husband against wife in his 1938 thriller (played by Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in the subsequent film). 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 protagonist suffers from spells of dead moods during which he perceives reality differently and when he comes to, he can’t remember anything…

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, however, resembled a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly towards its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation’ ( Reference HamiltonHamilton 1941: pp. 124–5).