Customer Reviews

The Slaves of Solitude (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The most atypical of Patrick Hamilton's novels (and perhaps the most beloved), THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE takes place in a suburban boarding house in 1943 where the heroine Miss Roach--intelligent, lonely, and on the cusp of middle age--has moved to escape the dangers of the Blitz. Commuting from the publishing house where she reads manucsripts in London, she spends her nights wandering the deserted unlighted streets, necking in parks with American soldiers, and being bullied at dinner by the sly and pompous autocrat of the dining room, Mr. Thwaites, another lodger at the Rosamund Tearoom where most of the action is set. This beautifully constructed little novel perfectly captures the mood of its time. It also anticipates the fascination with the alienation common among shabby-genteel boarding houses and pension-hotels that emblematizes the dilapidated middle-class culture of the UK in the twenty-five years after the war (as in Terrence Rattigan's SEPARATE TABLES or Elizabeth Taylor's MRS. PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT). The novel is in many ways exploring the nature of war itself on a figurative level, but it also first and foremost a comedy. Miss Roach's boarding-house nemeses, the sinister and German-born Vicki Kugelmann and the splenetic Mr. Thwaites, are so memorably awful and unpleasant they win the reader's heart immediately; Mr. Thwaites, in particular, is so beautifully drawn as to equal the best comic secondary creations of Dickens or Austen. The novel touches upon all kinds of tricky ideas about paranoia and consciousness that a clever reader might be interested in teasing out further, but simply as a comedy of manners this novel is a pure tonic.

Along with Hangover Square and One Thousand Streets Under the Sky, this is a tremendous novel. Hamilton writes beautifully about a cast of dreadfuls- the parochial bores, the bitchy backstabbing friends, and above all the boozers.

It is rare to read a book set in the 1940s which still seems so contemporary. The humour is biting and the depths and subtletys of character equal to Greene, Waugh and their ilk. Hamilton's writing brings to mind the Martin Amis school of tales from the London gutter, but his characters are achingly alive and never seem cartoonish.

If you can get your hands on the above(try amazon.co.uk), read all three...

The Slaves of Solitude (New York Review Books Classics)
Patrick Hamilton's work is gaining attention as a result of a 2007 publication of The Slaves of Solitude by The New York Review of Books. Originally published in 1947, it tells the story of residents in a boarding house in a small village located on a train line to London. Although they share the same dining room and lounge, the characters live their lives in solitude, limited by the conditions imposed on civilians by 1943 World War II. The distinguishing factor is the insight of the players that ranges from minimal to obsessive. This is a very engaging novel that immerses the reader in the era, location, and interaction of the characters. Readers are confronted by their own solitude and learn that insight is the result of sharing experiences with others. Hamilton's novel shows that war prevents isolation but encourages people to explore their solitude.

Life shouldn't have to be negotiated at every turn, but it is. The neighbors who play music simply to unhinge your sanity; the colleague who seems to sneer when passing you; the "friend" who constantly patronizes; the dinner parties that send you home feeling bruised and porous. If this sounds like your world, then SLAVES OF SOLITUDE is an excellent choice.

I'm not what sure what it is about wartime deprivation that lends itself to such discerning, acerbic satire, but two such novels from World War II have been rediscovered worldwide by readers in recent years. The more famous of these is Irene Nemirovsky's unfinished "Suite Francoise," which contains remarkable passages portraying (and mocking) the selfishness and follies of her fellow citizens while they were fleeing from the invading forces and then accommodating themselves to the occupiers--a portrait all the more powerful for having been written during the months before the author was imprisoned and killed in Auschwitz. The second novel, from across the Channel, is Patrick Hamilton's "The Slaves of Solitude," written only two years after the war, which depicts the frivolity and boredom of a few suburbanites enduring the inconveniences of rationing and blackouts.

I don't mean to overstate the parallels between the two novels; although both are unexpectedly, uncomfortably amusing, and although they share overlapping themes, they are very different books. Hamilton's is more deeply pessimistic--some might say misanthropic; his comedy of manners re-imagines the war as a series of disputes and misapprehensions among the two-bit boors and insecure pushovers living in a boarding house. The imperious Mr. Thwaites gets his masochistic thrills taunting the deceptively meek Miss Roach, the most "likable" resident. We soon realize that Mr. Thwaites sympathizes with the Axis powers, stemming partly from his hatred of the Russians, and the politics become even more complicated when Miss Roach, mostly out of boredom, begins a not-very-serious dalliance with an American lieutenant--a serial womanizer who has a serious drinking problem. Miss Roach then befriends Vicki Kugelmann, a German woman who immigrated to England as a child--and who turns out to be even more of a fiend than Mr. Thwaites. From there, the story takes a few truly unexpected turns, but at no point does it lose sight of the understanding that Miss Roach's acquaintances are very, very ridiculous.

It all sounds like a nightmarish soap-opera scenario--and that's not incidental to Hamilton's point. There's a horrific war going on, but you would never know it from the residents' small-minded backbiting and their preposterous adherence to middle-class mores. They live in a parallel universe, like children on a playground, where every grievance seems as serious to each of them as gunfire on a battlefield. As David Lodge puts it, "Hamilton is making the valid point that all suffering is relative." He is mirroring the theater of the boarding house with the theater of war. And the contest between Mr. Thwaites and Miss Roach is theater indeed: "Without knowing it, the guests looked forward to Miss Roach's safe return each night . . . perhaps because in their extreme of ennui, they even hoped to witness and share in the excitement of the battle between herself and Mr. Thwaites."

"The Slaves of Solitude" often borders on the hilarious--a hilarity whose cruelty can make the reader wince on occasion. But it is also a distressing and melancholy book. In the opening chapter, Miss Roach has escaped to a movie theater to sit alone, and a random stranger would have seen reflected on her face "bewilderment, sorrow, commiseration for others, loneliness," but above all "the simple emotion of fear . . . the fear of life, of herself, of Mr. Thwaites, of the times and things into which she had been born, and which boomed about her and encircled her everywhere." It's not long before readers realize that same look of apprehension and solitude will be found on the faces of all the characters in this novel. Hamilton has not just given us what may be the best novel ever written about civilians during wartime, he has also left us a masterpiece about the dread of being alone in the world.

This is the second book by Hamilton I read, my first one was Hangover Square. "The Slaves of Solitude" does not have this sinister atmosphere of Hangover Square, but I think it's even better and more nuanced as a human character study.

Hamilton creates such a precise portrait of Mrs Roach, the book protagonist, his depiction of other boarding house inhabitants is so detailed and persuasive, that it leaves one with the impression of really being there, knowing those people. Excellent, very detailed and emotional description of life in Britain during WWII too.

Patrick Hamilton manages to show each participant of this drama through their actions, language, attitudes: homegrown fascist and German sympathizer Mr. Thwaites, "totally inconsequential" American soldier whose behavior Mrs. Roach is trying to interpret - in vain, and Mrs. Roach's German lady "friend" who moves to her boarding house only to become her tormentor...

Hamilton is a writer who touches one of the most important conflicts in society: interaction between people with different psychological organization. Highly sensitive, vulnerable people which have to interact with aggressive and self-assured, scheming and arrogant, or indifferent and inconsequential - and nowhere to escape.

I agree with other reviewers that Patrick Hamilton is at the level of the best British prose: of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and others, and he deserves to be much better known and widely read, so NYRB classics as always provides a great service to the readers by publishing his books.

The Slaves of Solitude has been sitting on my TBR shelf since April 2008. The other day, when nothing else really appealed at the moment, I picked this one up. I enjoyed it immensely.

Written in 1947, The Slaves of Solitude is set at the height of WWII, in a suburb of London. Miss Roach is an imaginative, nearly-forty-year-old spinster, living in the Rosamund Tea Rooms (though they're no longer "tea rooms"). The book is told from her point of consciousness, but the novel is also about the other residents of the boarding house. There's Mrs. Payne, the landlady; tyrannical Mr. Thwaites; and Miss Steele and Mrs. Barratt. Later, a German woman moves in to the room next to Miss Roach's, and monopolizes the attentions of a young American lieutenant.

It's a short novel; only about 240 pages, and a quick read. But it's not an inconsequential one. Hamilton's writing style is sparse; he tended not to waste words on needless description. He depicts the deprivations of the War perfectly. It's ironic that Miss Roach, a former Londoner who survived the Blitz, is so unaware about what's going on around her. But maybe that's how she chooses to cope. The Slaves of Solitude is what's called black humor; there are funny moment mixed in with the serious businesses of blackout and rationing (Mr. Thwaites, in his boorishness, is especially entertaining). In all, this is a wonderful novel of people trying to shift in the dead of winter in a horrible war.

Patrick Hamilton has written a small masterpiece depicting life in an out of the way boardhouse in suburban London. The book is an excellent read filled with a surprise turn near the end. Hamilton has given us a careful humane study of people trapped in the terrors of World War II England. Any fan of good writing will enjoy this very insightful book.

This was my first Hamilton work, and I found it to be well-written and engaging. The characterization is terrific. It was a perfect weekend read and I plan to try another of his works.

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.

In this novel, set during the Blitz in 1943, he concentrates on Miss Roach, a woman of thirty-nine who is a secretary for a London publisher by day, and a commuter at night to the Rosamund Tea Room, a boarding house in Thames Lockdon, far from the bombings of London. Here, she and her fellow boarders take their meals and try to live "normal," peaceful lives. One of the long-time residents of the house, however, subjects newcomers to psychological warfare, similar to the real war they are trying to escape. Miss Roach, new to the residence, has become the focus of an ongoing attack by Mr. Thwaites, a man in his sixties, "a lifelong trampler on the emotions of others" who regards mealtimes as "torturing time." As a result, Miss Roach lives in "plain fear, fear of life, of herself, of Mr. Thwaites, of the times and the things into which she has been born, and which boomed about her and encircled her everywhere."

When Miss Roach meets American lieutenant Dayton Pike, who has recently had dinner at the Rosamund Tea Room, she and he become friendly, and her life changes. "Her" lieutenant enjoys kissing her, taking her to the local bar, providing her with "gin and french," and even talking generally about marriage. The arrival of Vicki Kugelmann, a German-born friend, turns her life upside down. Vicki "plays" on Mr. Thwaites--and Miss Roach's lieutenant--drinking to excess, joining them at the bar, using slang that Miss Roach finds coarse and common, and even calling Miss Roach not-so-joking names to her face. Miss Roach now hates her, imagining her cheering in Hitler's stadiums, and concluding, "It was [to be] war to the death...'

Patrick Hamilton's sense of satire and natural wit turn the Rosamund Tea House into an ironically depicted microcosm of 1943 life. Here he lays bare the inner lives of his characters, not through interior monologues but through their behavior, their revealing conversations, and their interactions with others. No character recognizes that any other character might inhabit a completely different inner world from the world that is visible in day-to-day behavior. All of them are seen as "slaves of their own solitude," and in their lonely lives, shown in poignant detail, they become sympathetic--and human--rather than truly laughable. Hamilton's ability to create sympathetic characters, while also conveying sense impressions, moments in time, and unique, visual observations about ordinary life is unparalleled, and one can only hope he at last finds the audience he truly deserves. Mary Whipple

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics)
Hangover Square