19,80€
Black comedy, and at the same time, a metropolitan drama, Hangover Square, is the masterpiece of Patrick Hamilton. The author reconstitutes the wretched, smoggy world of bars, cheap hotels, and drunken philosophers, immortalizing the ethos of an entire generation and capturing the signs of destruction that were looming over London’s life shortly before World War II broke out.
London, 1939. In the grimy publands of Earl’s Court, George Harvey Bone is chasing the object of his desire without hope. Netta is cold, contemptuous, cruel, but George is madly in love with her. Innocent as a child, tender, socially awkward, George is drunk every night, trying to distract her favor. Except for the moments when something goes click in his head, and he realizes, without a doubt, that he must kill her. Black comedy, and at the same time, a metropolitan drama, Hangover Square, is the masterpiece of Patrick Hamilton. The author reconstitutes the wretched, smoggy world of bars, cheap hotels, and drunken philosophers, immortalizing the ethos of an entire generation and capturing the signs of destruction that were looming over London’s life shortly before World War II broke out. “I believe that this novel is part of a group of corresponding European works of the same period, works that are doubtful if Hamilton knew them, but which nevertheless constitute something like the common cry of despair of European writers against what was coming and where the official politics of the time was trying to convince everyone that it was their idea, that the shiver they felt deep in their bones meant nothing, that was an isolated symptom, something like Bone’s schizophrenia, the central hero.” From the postface by Nikos A. Mantis
‘If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man’
“My favourites are the novels which capture the gloom, grubbiness and paranoia of Forties London life—for example…Patrick Hamilton’s fabulously poignant The Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Square.”
His finest work can easily stand comparison with the best of this more celebrated contempories George Orwell and Graham Greene.
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Patrick Hamilton
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