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

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It goes without saying – it should go without saying – that a dystopic vision underlies Hamilton’s novel. Under federal law, if you knowingly misrepresent that online material is infringing, you may be subject to criminal prosecution for perjury and civil penalties, including monetary damages, court costs, and attorneys’ fees. Having no memory of the killing, George is able to convince the police that he is innocent, but Middleton remains suspicious. This series Sara Cox and her celebrity guests review the best new releases, reminisce about their favourite classics and reveal their own comfort reads.

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It was all most odd and obscure – odder and obscurer than usual because of the darkness, the circumstances, the time, the dim, rain-washed dawn on the Brighton front… What on earth was he doing there at such a time? Published in 1941 and later hailed in the press as “one of the great books of the 20th century”, Hangover Square, like Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is written in a drolly detached style and explores the shabby crevices of London life and the dark, despairing alleys of the human heart. I doubt it and yet there are connections between Joseph K and George Harvey Bone which allow us to identify both of them as the grotesquely comic victims of forces over which they have no control.Under the headline LOOKING EXHAUSTED, the singer tells the waiting crowd that she is delighted to be released from hospital and she offers to sing to them. It also is a book about an unhinged man convinced by some very convoluted logic that he needs to murder a woman - in that it reminded me of Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato (which is a great book and you should read it). His novels, too, were ‘saturated with, almost drowned, in drink’ ( Reference HamiltonHamilton 1972) and Bone is a heavy drinking man. For this complete Between The Covers books list, I’ll start with the books picked for the most recent series, and then detail the previous series below. Hamilton captures explicitly well the smoke dense and beer-stained rooms as we move from pub to pub; from flats to lodgings; from one hangover to the next, in a London approaching the cusp of war.

Hangover Square, First Edition: Books - AbeBooks Hangover Square, First Edition: Books - AbeBooks

Patrick Hamilton knew Earl’s Court well, and when George Bone saunters up and down Earl’s Court Road, crosses Cromwell Road to see if the lights are on in Netta Longdon’s rooms, and ventures into pubs and cafes by the station, all this would have been familiar ground to the author. This is my third Patrick Hamilton novel, and the one thing common to them all is his ability to capture in few words the essence of his characters.In some respects he is quite like George Bowling, the protagonist of ‘George Orwell’s’ almost exact contemporary Coming Up For Air. 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 Google Drive account. Like protagonist and narrator George Harvey Bone, Hamilton's life was becoming saturated in alcohol; and like Bone he too was obsessed by an unattainable woman, in Hamilton's case she was actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. Within this series Sara Cox talks to the guests about their favourite books as well as a new book from 2021and a Booker backlist gem.

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton | Goodreads

The Slaves of Solitude (1947), was his only work to deal directly with the Second World War, and he preferred to look back to the pre-war years. Part of Hamilton’s genius is that he makes George so acutely and poignantly present to the reader: we see him vividly, this large, sad-eyed, shambling man who takes such innocent pleasure in things (a round of 68 on a Brighton golf course, a cigarette card, a stray cat) and yet remains so oddly mysterious. He was later involved in an altercation with the film's producer Robert Bassler, with Sanders punching Bassler. During the 1930s, like many other authors, Hamilton grew increasingly angry with capitalism and, again like others, felt that the violence and fascism of Europe during the period indicated that capitalism was reaching its end: this encouraged his Marxism and his novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) was a satirical attack of capitalist culture.

Hamilton splits his portrait between the plaintive drunk who repeats phrases in his head and the sober, fair-minded loner who sees the world for what it is. Dust jacket complete and unclipped, but rather worn with some paper loss, especially at head of spine/top left corner of front panel.

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It was like the world’s laugh in his face, Netta’s laugh, the last laugh of everybody at his failure and isolation, his banishment from the world of virile people who were happy and made love and had friends”. Netta finds George boring, yet for months she mercilessly manipulates him to extract money, dinners, drinks and all kinds of favors.

It is Hamilton’s non-naturalistic way of dramatising a split identity, though not, I should emphasise, the kind of doppelganger much favoured in late nineteenth century fiction and typified by Stevenson’s great novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 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. And this is all great and was discussed in many other reviews, so I’d like to focus on something else. Netta is repelled by George but, being greedy and manipulative, she and a mutual acquaintance, Peter, shamelessly exploit George's advances to extract money and drink from him. But in his biography, Nigel Jones says that Hamilton never accepted this line and was, for all his Communist sympathies, Churchillian in his patriotism.