Hangover Square
A Story of Darkest Earl's Court
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Hangover Square was written at the peak of Patrick Hamilton's fame - which was by this time considerable.
The main protagonist and narrator is George Harvey Bone, a lonely borderline alcoholic who suffers from a split personality, and is obsessed with gaining the affections of Netta, a failed actress. Written under the shadow of the seemingly unstoppable advance of Germany and Nazism, the book really succeeds is in its evocation of London as war looms.
In common with almost all of Patrick Hamilton's novels, the story is in part inspired by incidents from his own life. Like Bone, Hamilton's life was becoming saturated in alcohol; and like Bone he too was obsessed by an unattainable woman. In Hamilton's case, it was the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is the inspiration for Netta and in a sense could be Hamilton's revenge on her given the unflattering portrait...
"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..".
The novel searches for a human metaphor to express the sickness that Hamilton perceived in this period. As a Marxist he identified the petty bourgeoisie, from which Netta and Peter had sprung, as the enemy. Netta and Peter, along with the stranger who accompanies them to Brighton, are all fascists.
A masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamilton (1904 1962) captures the edgy, obsessive and eventually murderous mindset of a romantically frustrated British man in this WWII-era novel published in the U.S. as a separate volume for the first time. As the story opens, 34-year-old George Harvey Bone a heavyset, good-hearted failure is obsessed with his ongoing effort to either woo or, frighteningly, kill the lovely Netta Longdon, a callous, smalltime London actress whose charms seem limited to her physical beauty. Longdon shows little interest in Bone's advances, but she always seems ready to take advantage of Bone's generosity and to stab him in the back by, say, sleeping with one of his lowlife cohorts. As the book progresses and Bone gets more and more intense, it becomes clear that the virtual fugue state that he periodically enters is undiagnosed schizophrenia the twist is that everyone else's behavior is so beastly that Bone's plottings feel pretty much deserved. Hamilton is less successful introducing political material on Hitler's rise to power as the forces of war begin to overwhelm Britain, but the subtle power of the free indirect prose he uses to render Bone's deteriorating mind makes this an impressive character study and an oblique (and bleak) look at beleaguered prewar London.
