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A review by grubstlodger
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
5.0
I gulped this book down at a great lick, probably not digesting it fully but finding it too tasty to stop.
I’d enjoyed ‘Twenty-thousand Streets Under the Sky’ far more than I had expected and bought as much Patrick Hamilton as I could afford and knew I wanted to read one after I’d tackled ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’. I was expecting that book to be his most famous, ‘Hangover Square’ but the first page of this was too gripping.
London has been compared to a great monster many times before. Usually it is a voracious eater, plundering the local countryside and resources but this book described it’s main function as respiration. It breathes in people from the surroundings and at the end of the day breathes them out, following bus and train lines like oxygen in the bloodstream. It was striking. It was sombre. It was utterly gripping.
It is narrated by Miss Roach (nearly all the people in this are Mr, Mrs and Miss). She is a spinster, approaching forty with a failed teaching career and a minor job in publishing. It’s 1943 and she’s been bombed out of the city and lives in a dreary converted tearooms in a lightly fictionalised version of Henley on Thames. These lodgings are ruled over by the odious Mr Thwaites so she escapes for coffee visits with her friend Vicki, a german ex-pat who wants to live in the same building; and Lieutenant Lummis, an American who is taking advantage of being away from home.
It seems strange that this is the third novel (of the four I have read) narrated by a woman. Especially strange considering a lot of his work seems to have a deeply ambivalent attitude to women and he is so good at creating female monsters. Roach, for all her quiet unexcitingness, is a character who is easy to warm to. Part of this is due to the reader siding with her against the nasty characters.
Mr Thwaites is a total bully. His main abuse is against the English language. He often lapses into a jokey 'olde-English' manner of talking when he is in a good mood. The protagonist describes this as 'trothing' and she (and we) find it excruciatingly embarrassing and irritating. For example, he describes a pretty woman by saying “The damsel doth not offend the organs of optical vision.” He constantly torments Roach in subtle ways and makes life at the house about him. He was the very best depiction of an over-opinionated bore I have ever read.
The main plot of the book concerns Roach and Lummis and their strange kind of relationship. He once asked her to marry him but has never brought it up since. Mainly he spends his time away somewhere or drunk. The other is about Vicki, a German who seemed very nice at first but becomes Roach’s archenemy/ arch-frenemy, especially in her attempts to muscle in on Lummis. Roach has to realise she doesn’t really care for Lummis, isn’t threatened by Vicki and can overcome Thwaites in order to relinquish her slavery, go back to London and start to live again.
That said, it’s not really about plot, it’s about mood and tone. There’s a dry dinginess to the whole thing that is really resonating with the time of year. I frequently laughed at this book, especially when Thwaites was at his most awful and I was liberated and delighted by the ending.
Very good stuff.
I’d enjoyed ‘Twenty-thousand Streets Under the Sky’ far more than I had expected and bought as much Patrick Hamilton as I could afford and knew I wanted to read one after I’d tackled ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’. I was expecting that book to be his most famous, ‘Hangover Square’ but the first page of this was too gripping.
London has been compared to a great monster many times before. Usually it is a voracious eater, plundering the local countryside and resources but this book described it’s main function as respiration. It breathes in people from the surroundings and at the end of the day breathes them out, following bus and train lines like oxygen in the bloodstream. It was striking. It was sombre. It was utterly gripping.
It is narrated by Miss Roach (nearly all the people in this are Mr, Mrs and Miss). She is a spinster, approaching forty with a failed teaching career and a minor job in publishing. It’s 1943 and she’s been bombed out of the city and lives in a dreary converted tearooms in a lightly fictionalised version of Henley on Thames. These lodgings are ruled over by the odious Mr Thwaites so she escapes for coffee visits with her friend Vicki, a german ex-pat who wants to live in the same building; and Lieutenant Lummis, an American who is taking advantage of being away from home.
It seems strange that this is the third novel (of the four I have read) narrated by a woman. Especially strange considering a lot of his work seems to have a deeply ambivalent attitude to women and he is so good at creating female monsters. Roach, for all her quiet unexcitingness, is a character who is easy to warm to. Part of this is due to the reader siding with her against the nasty characters.
Mr Thwaites is a total bully. His main abuse is against the English language. He often lapses into a jokey 'olde-English' manner of talking when he is in a good mood. The protagonist describes this as 'trothing' and she (and we) find it excruciatingly embarrassing and irritating. For example, he describes a pretty woman by saying “The damsel doth not offend the organs of optical vision.” He constantly torments Roach in subtle ways and makes life at the house about him. He was the very best depiction of an over-opinionated bore I have ever read.
The main plot of the book concerns Roach and Lummis and their strange kind of relationship. He once asked her to marry him but has never brought it up since. Mainly he spends his time away somewhere or drunk. The other is about Vicki, a German who seemed very nice at first but becomes Roach’s archenemy/ arch-frenemy, especially in her attempts to muscle in on Lummis. Roach has to realise she doesn’t really care for Lummis, isn’t threatened by Vicki and can overcome Thwaites in order to relinquish her slavery, go back to London and start to live again.
That said, it’s not really about plot, it’s about mood and tone. There’s a dry dinginess to the whole thing that is really resonating with the time of year. I frequently laughed at this book, especially when Thwaites was at his most awful and I was liberated and delighted by the ending.
Very good stuff.