Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) explores disturbing themes of sexual obsession, death and loneliness, set in London’s night world of saloon bars and lodging houses, just as England is about to be dragged into the Second World War.

Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) was both a playwright and novelist. Plays like Rope and Gas Light were successfully turned into films, bringing Hamilton considerable fame and fortune. Perhaps lesser well known are his novels, which are extraordinary works in their own right.

Hamilton specialised in deep psychological explorations of the gloomier side of the human psyche – failed love affairs, the isolation of the individual in large cities, and the fleeting and unsatisfactory nature of many modern relationships. Quite often in Hamilton’s fiction, people make intimate connections with strangers who they know they will never meet again. Human relationships end up being disjointed, fumbling and incomplete.

Hangover Square was first published in 1941, when the author was in his late 30s. The novel is set in 1939, with the tense political situation of that year making for the story’s subtle backdrop. The Nazis are on their terrible and inexorable rise, while a naively optimistic Prime Minister Chamberlain thinks he has secured a peace agreement with Hitler.

George Harvey Bone is pursing the strikingly beautiful Netta, who is basically stringing him along for all she can get. Netta is friends with Peter, a fascist sympathiser, if not activist, who sometimes doubles as her lover. Netta is described as admiring Peter’s fascist political leanings, seeing a thrilling strength in fascism’s brutality. George Harvey Bone, by contrast, is an exquisitely sensitive soul whose only friend in the world seems to be a white cat he looks after at the hotel where he lodges. To make his problems worse, he drinks to excess to help cope with his emotional problems. The novel is perhaps unique in being a sustained portrait in masochism. British writer Quentin Crisp called sex the last refuge of the miserable, which perfectly captures the mood and tone of Hangover Square.

One last complexity is added to the novel: George Harvey Bone is deeply unstable, and his mind often ‘clicks’, allowing him to see things in a coldly rational light. It is in these moments that he decides that the only way to deal with his obsession with Netta is to kill her. As can be imagined, this novel ends happily for no one. It’s a story that is deeply saddening, as the reader sympathises with George Harvey Bone’s complete inability to cope with life. Of course if George had any sense he would not allow himself to become so obsessed with Netta, who he knows is simply using him for money and other favours.

Yet the portrait of George, showing his utter hopelessness and fragility, is so authentic, that it gives the novel a plaintive tone that is impossible to resist.

Hangover Square provides a comprehensive map of the human heart, exploring the type of sexual obsession that can only lead to despairing loneliness. It’s a unique achievement in literature.

Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 978-0-141-18589-7