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Patrick Hamilton

Modern Classics Hangover Square Paperback – International Edition, July 3, 2001

by Patrick Hamilton (Author), J B Priestly (Foreword)

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A pitch-black comedy set in London overshadowed by the looming threat of the Second World War, Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square includes an introduction by J.B. Priestley in Penguin Modern Classics. London, 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell, except in his 'dead' moments, when something goes click in his head and he realizes, without a doubt, that he must kill her. In the darkly comic Hangover Square Patrick Hamilton brilliantly evokes a seedy, fog-bound world of saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers, immortalising the slang and conversational tone of a whole generation and capturing the premonitions of doom that pervaded London life in the months before the war. Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. His plays include the thrillers Rope (1929), on which Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name was based, and Gas Light (1939), twice successfully adapted for the screen, the second time starring Ingrid Bergman. Among his novels are The Midnight Bell (1929); The Siege of Pleasure (1932); The Plains of Cement (1934); a trilogy entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), adapted into a BBC mini-series in 2007; Hangover Square (1941); and The West Pier (1951), Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955), which together comprise The Gorse Trilogy. If you enjoyed Hangover Square, you might like Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'One of the great books of the twentieth century' Independent on Sunday 'A masterly novel ... you can almost smell the gin' Keith Waterhouse, Spectator

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Classic
Publication date

July 3, 2001
Dimensions

5.08 x 0.67 x 7.8 inches
ISBN-10

0141185899
ISBN-13

978-0141185897
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick Hamilton was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. Born in Hassocks, Sussex, in 1904, he and his parents moved a short while later to Hove, where he spent his early years. He published his first novel, Craven House, in 1926 and within a few years had established a wide readership for himself. Despite personal setbacks and an increasing problem with drink, he was able to write some of his best work. His plays include the thrillers Rope (1929), on which Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name was based, and Gas Light (1939), also successfully adapted for the screen (1939), and a historical drama, The Duke in Darkness (1943). Among his novels are The Midnight Bell (1929); The Siege of Pleasure (1932); The Plains of Cement (1934); a trilogy entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935); Hangover Square (1941); The Slaves of Solitude (1947); and The West Pier (1951), Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955), which together comprise The Gorse Trilogy. J. B. Priestley described Patrick Hamilton as uniquely individual ... He is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil.' Patrick Hamilton died in 1962.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classic; New Ed edition (July 3, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141185899
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141185897
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 0.67 x 7.8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #207,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,767 in Classic Literature & Fiction

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5 star		51%
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1 star		4%

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Robert J. Katz

Always judge a book by its cover

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 8, 2021

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Came to this book on a recommendation by Wm. Boyle ( look him up and read his novels, "Gravesend, "City of Margins", etc)..Well drawn characters, Netta & George come to life and London, 1939 on the brink of war is alive.
I was completely unfamiliar with Hamilton's work, aware of the movie "Gaslight" but didn't connect him as the author of the book. George is hooked on Netta and eventually realizes what/who she is; George is a sad character but so trusting ( for a while) you can't help but like him even at the ending.

One person found this helpful

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Cphe

Hangover Square

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 24, 2018

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Poor George Bone is doomed from the opening page. Obsessed with the cold hearted and scheming Netta, he is an accident waiting to happen. Befuddled by alcohol and with a mental illness you know early on that George won't fair well.

The setting of a seedy Earls Court in 1939 is a fitting backdrop to this bleak and harrowing story.

Strong characterisation of both the primary and secondary characters make this well worth sourcing.

The second novel I've read by the author and it reads on par with the wonderful Slaves of Solitude.

3 people found this helpful

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Larry K.

Stupendous

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 18, 2021

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Read after the movie of the same name. Doubtful about the praise on the book jacket. After reading it, I praised it more than the book jacket. Far better than the movie (which was excellent). A must read book.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 9, 2020

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The product is a book by a wonderful English writer active from the 30s to the 50s. A great classic and I was delighted to obtain a good used copy from the used boo0k seller.

One person found this helpful

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Evan Drake

At His Best a Joy to Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 10, 2016

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Skip the first six chapters; they are an unnecessary prologue. Hamilton is like a sprinter who's slow out of the blocks. But when he gets up on his toes and reaches speed he is a joy to read. And then stumbles at the first hurdle. Just speed read until he catches your attention again.

One person found this helpful

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wendy

Good book. Very very bad publication.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2017

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I enjoyed reading Hangover Sq. However there were some issues with this publication. The Anthony Quinn introduction as advertised does not appear in my edition of the Europa Editions 2006 US version of this novel. The novel itself is very good Riveting in fact, but it is let down horribly by this publication which is full of typo errors, or more likely computer transcription errors from scanner to page. A poor shabby job. They should have more respect or at least read the book they are selling.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Great book!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

Quality is as described.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 14, 2016

Hamilton, Patrick. Hangover Square

Patrick Hamilton’s novel based in Earls Court and Brighton in 1939 is possibly the best anti-romantic novel ever written in English. First published in 1941 by Constable, it was reissued by Penguin in 1956 and became a Penguin Modern Classics book in 2001, sixty years after first publication. JB Priestley in his 1972 introduction finds Hamilton ‘above all the novelist of the homeless,’ which exactly describes the mood of the book. ‘He takes us into a kind of No-Man’s-Land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet,’ says Priestley, and he does this through exploring the interior world of his unlikely hero George Harvey Bone.

Bone is the classic ‘muff’ as Thackeray would call him. He is large, awkward and slavishly devoted to a woman who despises him. His romantic advances to Netta are apologetic and self-disparaging. He knows he stands no chance of engaging the attentions of this beautiful creature, yet cannot save himself from persisting in his timid approaches. Netta’s interest in George is undisguisedly one of convenience. Bone (her appellation throughout) is able to fund her life of pleasure, but he can in no way advance her social or theatrical career; the very reverse in fact. Netta emerges as a heartless scheming tart, seen through by all her male escorts, including, strangely enough, the aspiring Bone himself.

So far, so banal, but George Bone knows this and Hamilton skillfully addresses this weakness by providing a shell into which his hero ‘snaps’ or ‘cracks’ at frequent intervals. When inside the shell George sees Netta as despicable, so much so that from the outset he plans her death and his escape from justice and retirement to the country - to the aptly named Maidenhead, where safe from police and the dreary round of pubs he can live in peace. A man of two worlds, he plans to triumph over Netta so that if he can’t ‘have’ her he will kill her - and indeed Peter, the ex-killer and jailbird to whom she allows favours. George Harvey Bone is a great planner, a self-tortured romancer, but not until the end of the book does he stop crying and become, as he puts it, ‘a real man.’

One person found this helpful

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Joanne Sheppard

Dark, compelling and ominous portrait of a man at war with himself

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 28, 2017

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It seems incredible that I'd never read anything by Patrick Hamilton before, as I love books set in London in the early 20th century. Hamilton wrote primarily about London in the 1930s and his work is widely praised for being beautifully evocative of his time and location. While I was aware of his work as a novelist and a playwright (his plays included the brilliantly sinister Rope and Gaslight) I hadn't, for some reason, got around to reading his books. What finally prompted me to do so was Kathy Burke's enthusiastic review of Hangover Square on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read, which reminded me that there was a Hamilton-shaped gap on my bookshelf.

Hangover Square's protagonist is George Harvey Bone, a shambling, awkward, gentle giant of a man living in shabby Earl's Court on a small private income. Bone spends his days drifting from pub to pub with a group of drinkers that revolves around sometime actress Netta Longdon, with whom he is desperately and hopelessly in love. Fully aware of this, Netta is relentlessly cruel to George, openly taking every advantage of his placid nature and his generosity with his moderate funds while treating him without civility, let alone kindness. He is, to Netta and her bullying associates, 'the dumb butt of their unfriendly wit'. What Netta doesn't know, however, is that George suffers from some sort of schizoaffective disorder and experiences 'dead moods', strange periods of confusion during which his only clear thought and purpose is killing her.

If you think this sounds bleak, you'd be right - it absolutely is. Set in 1939 with war on the horizon, Hangover Square is a dark, bitter and deeply sad book, but it's also a brilliantly written and atmospheric one which I immediately loved. The characters drift through a grey, smoke-fogged world of Earl's Court pubs, boarding houses and bedsits that perfectly evoke pre-war London. George Harvey Bone himself is vividly memorable, frustratingly weak and self-destructive in his descent into alcoholism and slavish devotion to Netta, sinister during his dissociative episodes and yet somehow, I found myself rooting for him throughout. His delight when he reconnects with Johnnie, an affable, well-adjusted former friend from George's pre-Earl's Court days, is incredibly endearing. Whenever George briefly rediscovers a simple pleasure he used to enjoy, such as playing a round of golf or reading a novel, we catch a glimpse of a George pre-Earl's Court, a George pre-alcohol, a George pre-Netta, we realise what he could be if he could only find the strength to escape. Indeed, most people who meet lumbering, shy George away from Earl's Court do seem to like him - far more, in fact, than they like beautiful, confident Netta, of whom Johnnie gets the measure within moments.

Netta herself is an equally fascinating character, albeit one with few redeeming features: it's clear that she is an alcoholic, and I was able to feel some sadness for her in that respect, but she is also in every way the very antithesis of all things kind, fair and decent. In learning the novel's basic premise you could be forgiven for thinking that George is simply a bitter occupant of the 'friend zone', expecting a romantic relationship as a natural entitlement through no fault of Netta's own and resenting her as a result, but we soon learn that Netta is quite deliberately exploiting George in a way that is not only opportunistic and manipulative but deliberately sadistic. We see Netta at first only through the eyes of George, who hates and loves her in equal measure, and of course we wonder how reliable a picture he can paint - but when the omniscient narrator steps in to set us straight, we discover only that Netta is even worse than George has imagined.

Not only is Netta spoilt, lazy and spiteful, but also strongly attracted to fascism, bullying, violence and cruelty,and excited by her blackshirt friend Peter primarily because he has been to prison for violently assaulting a left-wing political opponent and for killing a pedestrian while drunk behind the wheel. Whereas George considers himself a liberal and is ashamed by the Munich Agreement, Netta is fascinated by Hitler and Mussolini and 'the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots, the swastikas, the shirts. She was, probably, sexually stimulated by these things in the same way as she might have been sexually stimulated by a bull-fight.'

There is an ominous sense of inevitability to Hangover Square, a looming sense of something terrible about to happen. George's predicament of constantly desperately trying to appease Netta despite his perpetual horror at her appalling behaviour, whilst on another level being convinced that killing her can be the only solution to his problems, seems all too fitting a metaphor for Britain in 1939, with George's internal conflict mirroring the build-up to the devastation of the Second World War.

I feel positively ashamed that it took me so long to get round to reading Hangover Square, as it's a compelling, distinctive novel that gripped me from the very first sentence. I'll definitely be reading Patrick Hamilton's other work in the near future.

26 people found this helpful

Mr. D. James

On Becoming 'A Real Man'

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

Hamilton, Patrick. Hangover Square

Patrick Hamilton’s novel based in Earls Court and Brighton in 1939 is possibly the best anti-romantic novel ever written in English. First published in 1941 by Constable, it was reissued by Penguin in 1956 and became a Penguin Modern Classics book in 2001, sixty years after first publication. JB Priestley in his 1972 introduction finds Hamilton ‘above all the novelist of the homeless,’ which exactly describes the mood of the book. ‘He takes us into a kind of No-Man’s-Land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet,’ says Priestley, and he does this through exploring the interior world of his unlikely hero George Harvey Bone.

Bone is the classic ‘muff’ as Thackeray would call him. He is large, awkward and slavishly devoted to a woman who despises him. His romantic advances to Netta are apologetic and self-disparaging. He knows he stands no chance of engaging the attentions of this beautiful creature, yet cannot save himself from persisting in his timid approaches. Netta’s interest in George is undisguisedly one of convenience. Bone (her appellation throughout) is able to fund her life of pleasure, but he can in no way advance her social or theatrical career; the very reverse in fact. Netta emerges as a heartless scheming tart, seen through by all her male escorts, including, strangely enough, the aspiring Bone himself.

So far, so banal, but George Bone knows this and Hamilton skillfully addresses this weakness by providing a shell into which his hero ‘snaps’ or ‘cracks’ at frequent intervals. When inside the shell George sees Netta as despicable, so much so that from the outset he plans her death and his escape from justice and retirement to the country - to the aptly named Maidenhead, where safe from police and the dreary round of pubs he can live in peace. A man of two worlds, he plans to triumph over Netta so that if he can’t ‘have’ her he will kill her - and indeed Peter, the ex-killer and jailbird to whom she allows favours. George Harvey Bone is a great planner, a self-tortured romancer, but not until the end of the book does he stop crying and become, as he puts it, ‘a real man.’

31 people found this helpful

Neasa MacErlean

Beautiful and disturbing - a 1939 nightmare

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2017

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This is the story of one man, George Harvey Bone, who — like all the rest of us — walks along a tightrope in life, trying not to fall off. Something has clearly gone wrong in his early years and, in his mid-30s, he is without a job, living in a room in a downmarket hotel in Earls Court and is an alcoholic. And he is infatuated by Netta, beautiful on the outside and ugly inside. And it is 1938/1939. George naturally hates the Munich "Peace in our time" accord between Chamberlain and Hitler but Netta and friends are latent fascists. And that ugliness underlies the sleazy, desperate events in the novel. For all that he is clumsy and a bit odd, George is a deeply lovable character who is fundamentally right..."he knew that Munich was a phoney business...Shame, that was all he had felt...He was so ashamed he could hardly look at the pictures..All grinning, shaking hands, frock-coats, top-hats, uniforms, car rides, cheers — it was like a sort of super-fascist wedding or christening." The big question of the novel is whether poor, lonely, weakened George can find the light or whether Netta and her nasty friends will drag him down further. It is a stunning, very atmospheric work that leaves a small permanent mark on you, and it is particularly interesting for having been published in 1941 - when, like George, the world was lost and not sure if it would succumb to its worst influences.

10 people found this helpful

Mr. Leslie Wood

Save your money, keep away or you will waste of six/eight hours of your life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 3, 2020

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I’m sorry but it must be me. Reading this ‘classic’ has been a complete waste of time. The story never moves forward, the main character is his own worst enemy and pretty much everyone else is unlikeable. The setting and period play little part in the book yet are lauded in the synopsis on the back cover. There is no immortalising of generation nor is there a premonition of doom, just sad characters drinking and being unpleasant. No twists, no darkness, nothing comedic, no gripping or nothing at all. Read the synopsis and the last three lines of the book and you have the complete novel without all of the padding and rambling on.

One person found this helpful

M. Dowden

George Harvey Bone

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 8, 2017

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Often called Patrick Hamilton’s best novel, this book which first came out in 1941 is something that you can really sink your teeth into. Here we meet George Harvey Bone who is the main character right at the beginning of this tale. Within a few pages we see that he has some type of mental affliction and that he wants to kill a woman called Netta, who he claims to love.

This starts off on Christmas Day afternoon in 1938 and then continues into the following year, and so there is the backdrop of war brewing in the air, and as we reach the end of this so Britain has declared war on Germany. Set mainly in the Earl’s Court area, London and Brighton here we meet the other main characters of the novel and find out about their relationships.

For George, Netta is the ideal of his life, although he has never slept with her or even had a proper date, but as we see this is not an ideal woman by anyone’s standards. Manipulative, a sponger, sluttish to a certain degree and always looking for a main chance for herself so we can understand why George wants to kill her. With George’s friend Johnnie on the scene, so Netta thinks that by getting to know him better so she will be able to use him to further her acting career.

As you would expect this is dark, and the characters can be quite complex, but will Bone carry out his plans, or not? The idea is originally to kill just Netta but we see this is expanded upon, and then to depart and live at Maidenhead. To me Bone is not a bad person and we read how his mind suddenly goes click and causes changes within him, which he has problems trying to cope or understand when he clicks back. Although a heavy drinker he isn’t quite as boisterous as other characters in this tale who can become quite obnoxious.

This really brings to life the areas where it is set and the time it is written in, and this makes for an illuminating study of a man with some serious problems. This could make a good choice for a book group as there is a lot to discuss here, and it is also worth reading the introduction to this story, although possibly after you have read the book.

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Modern Classics Hangover Square Paperback – International Edition, July 3, 2001

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