Customer Reviews

Hangover Square

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Hangover Square is centered around a group of young Brits drinking their way through 1939. It has a plot that slowly builds and eventually serves to expose the motives of all those involved. It recalls the tone created around liquor in The Sun Also Rises but with deeper character development (and as far as drinking goes- these guys are right there with that infamous group).

At its core is the book's main character, George Harvey Bone. George is obsessed with Netta Longdon for reasons that, I must admit, are completely unclear to me as she is one of the coldest and calculating women imaginable. A true femme fetale, really. She keeps punishing George and the poor sap just keeps coming back for more. In the midst of all this George has bouts with schizophrenia and 'moods' that severely hamper him and ultimately cause him to plot his revenge on everyone that he perceives as ever having wronged him.

Lots of novels have been written around drink with young drunks at their core, but nothing I've read has gone quite this deep into the allures of inebriation. However what really elevates Hangover Square is the manner in which the subtle charms and peaceful bliss of sobriety are also unearthed. One character sums it up by wondering if the hangover and the night before occurred in reverse chronology, would we even drink in the first place ? This inner calm of sobriety might be best exemplified by George's golf outing. It is an afternoon that proves to be both an escape from his mates and a confidence builder to be rewarded later by an 'in crowd', that opposed to his clique, actually possess some redeeming qualities. For the time being, he is validated.

I found Hangover Square in an odd way. I read a scathing review of a new novel by the book critic of The Atlantic wherein he blasted the new release that everyone else was raving about. His blanket negativity, in some weird way, fascinated me. So I looked into the guy and saw that he pretty much hated EVERYTHING. The web is a wonderful thing, so I took it on myself to find something- anything, that this critic found acceptable. Eventually I found something that he actually liked and it was Hangover Square, so I thought I'd read it. I am grateful that I did.

The journey is the reward here. 'Literary thriller' is an overused term, but here it is a very accurate description as plot, characterization and a life outlook all combine brilliantly. Patrick Hamilton's writing style is a direct one and a pleasure to read. The book grabbed me from the beginning. It covers all the bases and contains some wonderfully euphoric passages, but know that in the end it is a sad tale with a sad ending.

A great book - read it.

Criminally unknown and unheralded stateside, this book ranks alongside Julian MacLaren-Ross' "Of Love & Hunger" as a 20th century classic and, on the evidence currently cluttering up the bookshops and Oprah's club, will probably remain an unchallenged classic throughout the 21st century.

Simple, stupid George is in with a bad crowd - the sinister Peter, his crowd of unemployed hangers-on and the beautiful but cruel Netta with whom George is love. Spurned over and over, humiliated and ultimately resented for his weakness, it becomes increasingly difficult not to offer George your greatest sympathy, even given his occasional psychotic episodes where he realises he must kill Netta and escape his flimsy existence. This tale is an intense and moving study into the pain of unrequited love.

Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as "a criminally neglected British author," Patrick Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s, along with the famous dramas of Rope and Gaslight, and though he earned the admiration of a host of famous authors, from Graham Greene and Doris Lessing to Nick Hornby, he never achieved the popular success he deserved, either in his own time or throughout the twentieth century. In this decade, however, virtually all his novels have been reprinted in both Europe and in the US, and he is finally beginning to be recognized for his astute observations about his times and for his insights into the minds of his characters.

Indicating in the subtitle that this is "A story of darkest Earl's Court," Hangover Square is set in what was then a seamy, low-rent district of London, a place in which those who were down on their luck, out of work, or homeless could manage to scrounge through life. Bars and cheap entertainment provided evening activities for people who often did not get up before noon. George Harvey Bone, the main character here, is out of work. Like the other unemployed and under-employed people he associates with, he lives on the fringes of the entertainment business-part-time actors and actresses, managers, and movie makers who party long and hard, fueled by massive quantities of alcohol.

George's drinking might have triggered his earliest his "blackouts," but here they have become more frequent and more debilitating--psychotic episodes of schizophrenia which end with the demand that he kill Netta Longdon to save himself. Netta is a failed actress--a beautiful, spoiled, and manipulative woman who ignores George except when she wants money, a woman who sleeps around with his friends (though not with him), and uses him. He is so desperate for her attentions, however, that he allows himself to be degraded, always hoping that she will see him for the person he really is. As he is driven closer to the edge and as his "dead moods" get closer together, the suspense grows. "Getting killed would serve her jolly well right," he rationalizes.

The narrative line, which takes place inside George's head, is strong and emotionally affecting, and though many contemporary readers will be frustrated at George's passivity in the face of Netta's abuse, few will fail to empathize. Based in part on his own life, the novel is an intense psychological drama written by a man who became an alcoholic at a young age, after being disfigured in an accident. Frequently developing passionate but unrequited attachments, he wrote about these women in his novels. Famed actress Geraldine Fitzgerald was recognized as the model for Netta Longdon, something her obituary confirms. Mary Whipple

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics)
The Slaves of Solitude (New York Review Books Classics)
Gorse Trilogy "The West Pier," "Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse," "Unknown Assailant" (Import)

This is truly one of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century...it's a sad commentary on our country when this is unavailable in the US while so much trash can be had in every mall bookstore. Netta is without a doubt the most memorable villain in modern literature.

George Harvey Bone has schizophrenia. Is his life dark and tortured because of that? or does he have schizophrenia because his life is dark and tortured? Life in London in 1939 for George and his peers does look dark and bleak in itself, but George seems to be much more vulnerable than anybody, and much more vulnerable than Netta, young woman he has a misfortune to be madly in love with, who has sensitivity of a fish, according to Hamilton's description.

Most of the people surrounding Bone have fun at his expense, including Netta. George does recognize this, but he has no willpower to break out of this situation, so he keeps suffering, and this mental suffering probably contributes to his schizophrenic spells, during which he nurses murderous thoughts.

This book brings to mind both Idiot and The Insulted and Humiliated by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and this is not too huge an exaggeration: Hamilton does create very powerful and gripping characters, narrative and social scenery, so comparison with Dostoevsky at least gives one a proper framework to place both Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude.

Lots of details, very clear and powerful language - this book deserves to be much better known than, say, "The Collector" by Fowles, but... when they asked Beethoven why his 8th is much less popular than his 7th, he replied: "But it's so much better, that's why!"

Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel, Hangover Square, is confirmation that hangovers form the foundation of alcoholism. Palliation of symptoms is only a drink away. The main character, George Harvey Bone leads the reader into a world of drink-inflicted physical illness, and we understand it as a way of life for all the important characters. But, George has an additional illness, schizophrenia, that creates another world available only to him and to the reader. Hamilton's writing is seductive, and the reader accepts and wants to enter this second dimension. We want George to go beyond the hangover and "click" into his special psychotic state. It is in this state that George achieves a peace he cannot get any other way, safe from the chaos of hangover square and his obsession with Netta. Safety, however, is governed by evil, and readers are confronted with the peace of their own evil desires.

Hangover Square is a novel of physical and mental sickness that shows parallels with the so-called normal lives of readers. Hamilton's wonderful insight into the human comedy/tragedy makes this novel come to life even though, on the surface, readers do not feel that they have much in common with the characters. This insightful style is evident in another Hamilton novel, The Slaves of Solitude (1947). I predict that when readers enter George's two worlds, they will discover that they are only one drink and one click away from illness and madness.

Like others, I discovered Hangover Square by accident. While reading Martin Gardner's annotated version of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, I read a brief footnote on this "bleak" novel set in what Hamilton viewed as the rundown section of central London, Earl's Court. The book hooked me from the beginning, because George Bone, the ultimate loser, is what all of us are in some secret part of ourselves we never let out in public. He's not a born loser. He's that way because he wants to be, he can't think of any other life that would suit him. Hamilton calls him schizophrenic, but he doesn't hallucinate and he's only delusional when he thinks his best friend has betrayed him. He's more like what would today be called a dissociative personality disorder, someone who goes into fugue states he doesn't remember when he comes out of them, and that serve the purpose of letting him think thoughts unthinkable in his full conscious state. He's also a burned out alcoholic, which contributes to what Hamilton calls his dumb, dead moods.

At it's heart, Hangover Square is the story of an obsessive unrequited love whose purpose is to be unrequited. Bone's fixation on the beautiful but tawdry Netta Longdon keeps him immobilized, which is, at bottom, the way he wants to be. If he could get over Netta, or if he could somehow win her, he'd have to do something, to commit to something. Other than alcohol, the last thing Bone wants to do is commit to anything. He is, in other words, what all of us would be if we gave into whatever addictive propensities we have and in essence quit living in the world. Bone's days are filled with two things: longing for Netta and drinking because he can't have her. Or drinking because he wants to be near her, or because he wants to hang out with her even more disreputable male friends (she appears to have no woman friends).

Hangover Square is a masterpiece of the "down and out" style of novel that became popular during the depression. It's as if Hamilton gave himself the task of constructing a character with no redeeming features with whom readers would nonetheless identify and in some way cheer for. It's almost miraculous that he made this thin story and its dunce of an antihero interesting for 350 pages. Hangover Square is impossible to put down because its characters are so vivid, and because there's such grim fascination with Bone's masochism and Netta's fish-like indifference to others (Hamilton's trope), you can't help wanting to see how far down they'll go. As a psychological study of a kind of character most people would not look at twice, Hangover Square is priceless.

Published in 1941, this book has been called Patrick Hamilton's best novel. It was set mainly in London in the nine months leading up to the outbreak of World War II. It followed the disordered emotional life of a sensitive, educated man living off savings and passing time with lowlifes in cheap Earls Court apartments and West End bars.

For this reader, most memorable were the depiction of bar-hopping, hoped-for camaraderie, and overdrinking with anyone available to stave off loneliness, especially in the book's first half. But the novel's main focus was the naive man's pathetic infatuation with a failed actress. Here the author showed his flair for dialogue, particularly with the soulless woman's catty remarks, and describing her heartless behavior. And for portraying the man's fragile psychological state, as he kept losing his bearings and groping his way back to an understanding of who he was and what he was doing. The author suggested that the lowlifes' behavior reflected the impulses that had led to fascism on the Continent, though he omitted to write anything about Stalinism or the USSR's pact with Germany.

Eventually, in the book's second half, this reader began to find the man's masochism with the woman less credible and harder to bear. He kept repeating a cycle of excitement, anger at betrayal, murderous intent, and loss of will, which snapped his mind back and forth a few too many times. I kept wanting to urge him to stop being a dupe and a dope, to stop whining and get on with it. By the end, he seemed much more distraught by the thought of betrayal by his noble male friend than by the woman he supposedly loved, and happiest when finding acceptance by his male "betters."

Another book that described mental disorder and sexual excitement using shifts in time and location, more powerfully in my opinion, was John Franklin Bardin's Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (1948). For a more extensive depiction of the West End joined to fascinating knowledge of the London netherworld, Gerald Kersh's Night and the City (1938). And for blood-curdling menace, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952).

Hamilton addresses the diminishing importance of the individual in the face of the modern superstate. This novel resembles in atmosphere the 'film noir' genre of the contemporary cinema. George Harvey Bone's pathetic career is 'sensationalised', made lurid and larger than life, so that he becomes like a figure in a melodrama. Hamilton uses language that focus the reader's view through those of Bone, self-obsessedly viewing his own actions, his "great golfers hands" on the golf club for example, as he tries to invest himself with some feeling of worth while sub-consciously plotting murder. Bone's schizophrenic world threatens to explode throughout the book , just as the dark clouds of war with Europe gather threateningly in the background. The tiny tragedy of Bone' s demise is deliberately made to read like pulp fiction, in a sense, and the report of his death, forced off the front page by the breaking out of war, is likewise reduced to a tabloid headline.

The whole setting of the book is artificial; "the agony of Netta beneath the electric light"; the great wave of laughter (the world's laughter) that breaks over Bone as he enters the lime-lit Brighton theatre, are part of the harsh artificiality of the world that Bone inhabits. His friends are cynical and talk enthusiastically of fascism.

I am reminded by this book of the world described in Henry Miller's early work (Tropic of Capricorn etc) and of George Orwell's 'Coming up for Air' in which, once again, events build against the mounting threat of World War II, and the protagonists (George 'Fatty' Bowling) sense of personal history, values and identity are buried by the onslaught of suburban sprawl and its attendant advertising, materialism and the dislocation of community.

Hamilton predicts the present day world of media obsession with personal agony, which trivialises all human anguish and tribulation, reducing human experience and suffering to a commodity to be consumed, rather than a shared touchstone of communication, understanding and empathy.

Hamilton's brilliance lies in the clever contrivance of allowing us to feel Bone's pathetic agony, and yet to see it transformed into a trite, turgid melodrama, which is interchangeable in the daily press with a major international war. This is the kind of attitude, towards the small business of being human, that was necessary to prepare the world for the introduction of concentration camps and mass political executions.

Imagine George Harvey Bone as a character in a Thomas Hardy novel: (Bone could be transformed into a country rube quite easily!) His unfortunate story would be imbued with a sense of sanctity and respect that Hamilton deliberately defiles and destroys before our very eyes, using exactly the same means in achieving this end as the media of his day, and as the media of the present day does in a way that both Hamilton and Orwell could forsee, perhaps, but surely never appreciate the oppressive monstrous extent to which it has come.

This is one of the last novels, it seems to me, written before the obsession with the selfish concerns of the individual (the first article of faith of capitalism) became the only concern of the writer. Hamilton's book clearly indicates the coming of this self obsession. From here on, solipsism rules OK?