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

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Now penniless, he gasses himself in a dingy Maidenhead boarding house by turning on the gas fire but not lighting it. His examination of England in the limbo between Munich and the declaration of war is so quiet and understated that its skill may have been overlooked. Cut to the concert hall, filling with flame and smoke, as George plays the last notes of his concerto. The last seven words of this novel, which I cannot quote, sum up everything that happened in Hangover Square, perfectly and devastatingly. The shilling life that gives you most of the facts is Nigel Jones, Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton, Abacus, 1991.

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

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 . Often these books will tell you, in a voice like Harvey Fierstein's, but louder and less mellifluous, that Susan Sontag is (I mean, was) an enthusiastic fan of it.

Spine is sunned and soiled, with text being almost invisible, board extremities are a little bumped and worn. It’s almost 60 years since his death, and 80 years since the publication of his best-known work, Hangover Square, the title a pun on London’s Hanover Square and a signpost to the book’s pub-land milieu. The actual milieu of Hamilton’s fiction tends to be specific: it is in many cases London’s impermanent acreage of boarding houses, mean hotels and cheerless bedsitters. The reviews, after a slow start, warmed to the book, and its sales took off when James Agate, the most revered critic of his day, devoted a column to it in the Daily Express: “Don’t gulp this,” he recommended, “ration yourself to 50 pages a day, and make it last the week.

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. However, the similarities with a late-19th century French fuguer are clear and perhaps this condition provides a better frame for the main character's experiences. Gin is his passport to interacting with others and the currency with which he purchases Netta’s favour.There, he keeps reminding himself, he had for a brief period of his childhood been happy, living with a sister now dead, before he was sent away to public school. It is George’s refuge, at once his reason for living and his means of access to Netta’s company of drunkards, who take advantage of his easygoing way with money.