Which is Hamilton’s point. Or rather, because novels don’t exist to make a point, it’s what we can infer from all that Hamilton shows us. George’s aunt embodies old-style decencies. Her washed-out kindliness is a world away from the rootless, amoral decadence of Hangover Square. Bone belongs to the Square but he is not really of it. At the beginning of the novel we are even told that he would prefer to be a countryman. ‘He wanted a cottage in the country – yes, a good old cottage in the country – and he wanted Netta as his wife. No children, just Netta – and to live with her happily and quietly ever afterwards.’ In your dreams, as the saying goes. What I did notice is that there is something nomadic about it, the "atmosphere of homeless" (as it is described in the introduction to the novel), the feeling of desperate desire to get away, of someone trying to escape... She is just using him and he gets nothing in exchange. But every deception leaves a little teardrop of bitterness… We are, in many ways, made to almost want George to get revenge and murder the awful people who use and abuse him. On the one hand, there's a certain delight to be had in these bullies coming to a messy end; on the other, George essentially stalks and harasses a woman who has made it clear she isn't interested, and then proceeds to try and murder her. There's a tempting feminist perspective essay right there.

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Hamilton finished writing the novel in February 1941, delivering it a month later to his publishers. He seems to have been in two minds about its merit, telling his brother Bruce that it was “unambitious” and yet, perhaps, “the best thing I’ve ever written!” As the daughter of a librarian Jen's love of books started from a very early age. Her reading obsession continued throughout her teenage years when she studied both English Language and English Literature at college. Hangover Square is, of course, a metaphorical place, a stopover on the long and lonely pub crawl to alcoholic oblivion. To adapt a phrase of Philip Larkin’s, drink is to Hamilton what daffodils were to Wordsworth. It is George’s refuge, at once his reason for living and his means of access to Netta’s company of drunkards, who take advantage of his easygoing way with money. The actual milieu of Hamilton’s fiction tends to be specific: it is in many cases London’s impermanent acreage of boarding houses, mean hotels and cheerless bedsitters. The West End of his trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) now shares space in Hangover Square with the lowering environs of Earl’s Court and desultory excursions to seaside towns. It is George’s unhappy fate that he can never settle anywhere, seemingly always in transition from one place to another. Even Maidenhead, the town he conceives as his idyll, proves in the end illusory. He was the author of 11 more novels, and penned two substantial hit plays, Rope and Gaslight, which enjoyed successful lives on screen too. pp. 8vo, publisher's pictorial wrappers. First edition; advance copy. Some use to joints; front flap neatly reattached with tissue; a very good copy.Why must he kill Netta? Because things had been going on too long, and he must get to Maidenhead and be peaceful and contented again. And why Maidenhead? Because he had been happy there with his sister, Ellen. They had had a splendid fortnight there, and she had died a year or so later. He would go on the river again, and be at peace. … But first of all he had to kill Netta. Hangover Square is a darkly comical, rarely sober, atmospheric trip through the streets and pubs of prewar London. By the end of his life, his drinking was the stuff of legend – glasses of Guinness in the morning, gin before lunch, whisky after tea, a post-war intake that apparently rarely fell below about three bottles a day. He is obsessed with gaining the affections of Netta, a failed actress and one of George's circle of acquaintances with whom he drinks. Netta is repelled by George but, being greedy and manipulative, she and a mutual acquaintance, Peter, shamelessly exploit George's advances to extract money and drink from him. When meeting her after a parting of any length he never dared to look at her fully, to take her in, all at once. He was too afraid of her loveliness – of being made to feel miserable by some new weapon from the arsenal of her beauty – something she wore, some fresh look, or attitude, or way of doing her hair, some tone in her voice or light in her eye – some fresh ‘horror’ in fact.

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Maybe I couldn't feel deeply sorry for George because he is so full of self-piety...or because he has fallen so low. Still, it was really fascinating to read about him. George seems to be this novel, meaning that it feels like his diary, an exploration of his soul. I won’t idolize George. As I said, I liked the fact he felt so real. Perhaps too flawed as a person to love, but so well written as a character that it was impossible not to get caught up in the story.Los Angeles Times: "as a character study and social portrait of the seedier side of London life in the 1930s, the book is a marvel." This is a book about endless cycles of drinking binges and hangovers. It also is a book about an unhinged man convinced by some very convoluted logic that he needs to murder a woman - in that it reminded me of Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato (which is a great book and you should read it).

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Parts of the story are unfortunately autobiographical. Hamilton himself was an alcoholic, turning to drink after becoming disfigured in a car accident. J.B. Priestley described him "as an unhappy man who needed whiskey like a car needed petrol." He was also known to have been a stalker of the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald and the character of Netta is said to be based on her. published in London Fictions, Five Leaves: 2013, and posted here in October 2016; minor reformatting January 2018]

References

It’s a world which Hamilton – who died of cirrhosis of the liver aged 58 in 1962 - knew at first hand. He started drinking heavily and regularly circa 1927, while in his twenties - haunting pubs in Earl’s Court, Chelsea, Soho and around Euston Road. In The Slaves of Solitude, his 1947 evocation of wartime suburban England – modelled on Henley - a meek secretary, Miss Roach, is bullied on a daily basis at her lodging house by a typical Hamiltonian monster – the Nazi-sympathising Mr Thwaites who has “the steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly’s wing”. You can’t say that he’s forgotten. And in some ways, he’s more ubiquitous than ever – the much-used phrase “gaslighting” derives from the subtly destructive mind-games conducted by husband against wife in his 1938 thriller (played by Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in the subsequent film).