A welcome reissue of one of Patrick Hamilton's best, with an introduction by Doris Lessing. "The Slaves of Solitude" is set in a wartime boarding house in a small town on the Thames. The Rosamund Tea Rooms is an oppressive place, as grey and lonely as its residents. For Miss Roach, slave of her task-master, solitude, a window of opportunity is suddenly presented by the appearance of a charismatic American Lieutenant. His arrival brings change to the precarious society of the house and ultimately, to Miss Roach herself.
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"* 'Patrick Hamilton was a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected... I'm continually amazed that there's a kind of roll call of OK names from the 1930s, sort of Auden, Isherwood, etc. But Hamilton is never on them and he's a much better writer than any of them... [he] was very much outside the tradition of an upper-class or middle-class writer of that time. He wrote novels about ordinary people. He wrote more sense about England and what was going on in England in the 1930s than anybody else I can think of, and his novels are true now. You can go into any pub and see it going on.' Doris Lessing * 'His finest work can easily stand comparison with the best of this more celebrated contempories George Orwell and Graham Greene.' Sunday Telegraph"
About the Author
Patrick Hamilton was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. His plays include Rope (1929), on which the Hitchcock thriller was based, and Gas Light (1939). Among his novels are The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure, The Plains of Cement, Twenty-thousand Streets under the Sky 1935, Hangover Square 1941, The Slaves of Solitude 1947 and The West Pier. He died in 1962.
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4.5 out of 5 stars
15 reviews
35 of 36 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tempest in a Tearoom
Feb 23 2007
By Jay Dickson
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
One of the most atypical of Patrick Hamilton's novels (and perhaps the most beloved of them), 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.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, intelligent, witty and humane. A lost master.
Nov 14 2000
By Chandler
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
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...
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sharing Solitude
Jan 19 2008
By Gary Severance
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
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