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

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My view is that Hamilton isn’t really trying to write a satire of a particular time period or society. He does touch on that and the creates the atmosphere of that time brilliant. Nevertheless, at least in this novel he seems to be more concentrated on the individual than the society. It is possible to read it as a critique of society. He certainly has a brutal way of showing all human imperfections and weaknesses. He does that with style! In one sense, this novel can be viewed as a critique of a society. We’re cruel beasts, and it’s awful, and sometimes it’s awfully funny, Hamilton tells us. His work repays attention.

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton | Goodreads Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton | Goodreads

Most readers (including yours truly) tend to sympathise with Bone, because deep down inside, he is a ‘nice guy’, while Netta is an evil femme fatale. Additionally, it’s a motif that repeats itself in many of Hamilton’s books and is heavily autobiographical, so obviously it’s presented in a way to make us feel sorry for Bone. 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. The ending is predictably bleak. Hamilton's social and political concerns are manifest in the reality of George's arrival in Maidenhead. Throughout the book, Maidenhead represents a hope, an "after", a reward for accomplishing his goals. But, alas, was it all just a shiny dream?As always Sara and her guests will be discussing a new book release. There will also be six Booker Prize gems to be discussed over the six weeks. Between The Covers Books List Series 7 – Book List New Releases 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. 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. Series two was launched in May 2021. Sara Coxtalks toguest starsabout their favourite books as well as a popular book from2020, and a book recently published in2021. Between The Covers Books List Series 2 – Books List New Releases

Hangover Square, First Edition - AbeBooks Hangover Square, First Edition - AbeBooks

He was sane enough. If you didn’t count the ‘dead’ moods, he was sane enough. In fact he was probably too sane, too normal. I also love how he makes me empathise and at times identify with George by giving him these completely normal insecureties which I think everyone has, and then blowing them up so much that they overcome and drive him. I was also very fascinated with Netta, this despicable and vile woman! How did she get that way! Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against, bad faith, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail. Each of the novel’s Parts carries at least one epigraph. This is the epigraph for the Seventh Part.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.

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

Laird Cregar as George and Linda Darnell as Netta in the 1945 film adaptation. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Robinson, Judy (May 5, 2012). "George's 'bad boy' antics behind the scene" . Retrieved May 16, 2015. 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. Sanders also brought complications. Having been placed on suspension the previous year for refusing to perform in The Undying Monster, he accepted the role of Dr. Allan Middleton. However, he was unhappy with his script, particularly the final line in the film, which required him to justify the death of George Harvey Bone by saying, "He's better off this way." When shooting the scene, which was very expensive to film, Sanders repeatedly refused to say the line. He was later involved in an altercation with the film's producer Robert Bassler, with Sanders punching Bassler. The line was later changed to "It's better this way." [6] 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.

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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. 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! If it’s not about a very particular social milieu (Earl’s Court seediness, 1939 – the war approaches) or mid-level alcoholism, or mental illness, this novel is about the grim truths of looksism. The only think which Netta has going is her looks, and we are given to understand that she’s a total wow, it’s not just George that thinks so. We have our noses shoved into the ineluctable caste system of looksism, which divides the human race into those who have looks and those who can only look. Human beauty, beloved, adored, feared even, lusted after – the 9s go out with the 9s, the 7s with the 7s, it’s a universal rule, except that the ugly men have discovered that if they make enough money then 4s can go out with 8s or even 9s. But do looks make you happy? We who are without them fervently hope they don’t and then feel mean for thinking such thoughts. Maybe that’s why the myth of Marilyn is so cherished – there was a fabulous looker who was one mixed up shook up girl. The sufferings of George Harvey Bone in his complete prostration before Netta’s beauty reminded me hatefully of periods in my own life I would be happy to have removed by the device in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ugh. The Slaves of Solitude, Constable, 1947, reprinted 1972, later reprinted by Penguin. A brilliant, scabrous account of wartime England, using much the same technique as that employed in Hangover Square.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. 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.