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A review by lookhome
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
5.0
'Oh, this world (thought miss Roach as they sped along) int which I have been born! And oh this war, through which it is my destiny to pass! (Though pass was not the word, for she could not conceive any end to it). (Hamilton, 118)
The Slaves of Solitude with its minutely detailed accounts of petty frustrations and power struggles in the controlled social space/interactions of WW2 London becomes unsurprisingly relevant in this, the 'Covid' era.
This is a good book made great due to the timing.
In it, we follow the lives of multiple people through the eyes of its antagonized protagonist Miss Roach.
It traces her encounters with a solider, a German immigrant, a covert but refined theater thespian and a crotchety, scared, Pseudo-intellectual bully.
It's environment is particularly English and there's something of doomed weekend as experience in the Withnail and I vein that seems to reverberate here.
You won't find any real or applicable life philosophies or any monumental narrative twists. What this book consists of is a particular kind of human understanding.
It breathes from an author that understands and reflects on human gesture, human emotion and the human need to connect.
Hamilton wrote beautifully in Hangover Square and does so again here.
'When he at last came out the other elderly guests were already setting about their business- the business, that is to say, of those who in fact had no business on this earth save that of cautiously steering their respective failing bodies along paths free from discomfort and illness in the direction of the final illness which would exterminate them' (70)
There's a tranquil sense of despair that rhythmically beats its heart into and throughout its constructed rooms. A haze of unfiltered chaos made bearable by the war's ability to confine and force unnatural interactions between various English classes and age brackets.
Worth a read, if only to remember that literature should give us something to ponder and it invariably does when describing things truthfully. For capital T Truth is timeless and loneliness, dread, anxious social interactions, and meaninglessness of war and unwanted but imposed shared social spaces
remain as timely as ever.
The Slaves of Solitude with its minutely detailed accounts of petty frustrations and power struggles in the controlled social space/interactions of WW2 London becomes unsurprisingly relevant in this, the 'Covid' era.
This is a good book made great due to the timing.
In it, we follow the lives of multiple people through the eyes of its antagonized protagonist Miss Roach.
It traces her encounters with a solider, a German immigrant, a covert but refined theater thespian and a crotchety, scared, Pseudo-intellectual bully.
It's environment is particularly English and there's something of doomed weekend as experience in the Withnail and I vein that seems to reverberate here.
You won't find any real or applicable life philosophies or any monumental narrative twists. What this book consists of is a particular kind of human understanding.
It breathes from an author that understands and reflects on human gesture, human emotion and the human need to connect.
Hamilton wrote beautifully in Hangover Square and does so again here.
'When he at last came out the other elderly guests were already setting about their business- the business, that is to say, of those who in fact had no business on this earth save that of cautiously steering their respective failing bodies along paths free from discomfort and illness in the direction of the final illness which would exterminate them' (70)
There's a tranquil sense of despair that rhythmically beats its heart into and throughout its constructed rooms. A haze of unfiltered chaos made bearable by the war's ability to confine and force unnatural interactions between various English classes and age brackets.
Worth a read, if only to remember that literature should give us something to ponder and it invariably does when describing things truthfully. For capital T Truth is timeless and loneliness, dread, anxious social interactions, and meaninglessness of war and unwanted but imposed shared social spaces
remain as timely as ever.