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Patrick Hamilton
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Hangover Square Paperback – January 1, 2006

by Patrick Hamilton (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 171 ratings
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"Hamilton . . . is a sort of urban Thomas Hardy: . . . always a pleasure to read, and as social historian he is unparalleled."-Nick Hornby

"A much better writer than Auden, Isherwood . . . and his novels are still true now. You can go into any pub today and see it going on."-Doris Lessing, The Times

Adrift in the grimy pubs of London at the outbreak of World War II, George Bone is hopelessly infatuated with Netta, a contemptuous, small-time actress. George suffers from occasional blackouts, during which one thing is horribly clear: he must murder Netta.

Patrick Hamilton enjoyed worldwide popularity during the 1930s. His play Rope was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, and another, Gaslight, was a great success on the stage before being made into a film starring Ingrid Bergman.

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  1. Part of series
    Fiction - General
  2. Print length
    280 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Europa Editions
  5. Publication date
    January 1, 2006
  6. Dimensions
    5.3 x 1 x 8.2 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    9781933372068
  8. ISBN-13
    978-1933372068
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hamilton (1904–1962) captures the edgy, obsessive and eventually murderous mindset of a romantically frustrated British man in this WWII-era novel published in the U.S. as a separate volume for the first time. As the story opens, 34-year-old George Harvey Bone—a heavyset, good-hearted failure—is obsessed with his ongoing effort to either woo or, frighteningly, kill the lovely Netta Longdon, a callous, smalltime London actress whose charms seem limited to her physical beauty. Longdon shows little interest in Bone's advances, but she always seems ready to take advantage of Bone's generosity and to stab him in the back by, say, sleeping with one of his lowlife cohorts. As the book progresses and Bone gets more and more intense, it becomes clear that the virtual fugue state that he periodically enters is undiagnosed schizophrenia—the twist is that everyone else's behavior is so beastly that Bone's plottings feel pretty much deserved. Hamilton is less successful introducing political material on Hitler's rise to power as the forces of war begin to overwhelm Britain, but the subtle power of the free indirect prose he uses to render Bone's deteriorating mind makes this an impressive character study and an oblique (and bleak) look at beleaguered prewar London. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

An intoxicating thriller. -- Library Journal (starred review)

Hangover Square s hapless protagonist is one of the great tragic fools in modern fiction. -- The Villiage Voice

Makes almost all other hard-boiled writing seem phoney once read, it becomes forever after a part of your experience. -- The Boston Phoenix

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1933372060
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Europa Editions; First Edition (January 1, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 280 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781933372068
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1933372068
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 1 x 8.2 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 171 ratings

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Patrick Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
171 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Gary Severance
5.0 out of 5 stars The Peace of Madness
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2008
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Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel, Hangover Square, is confirmation that hangovers form the foundation of alcoholism. Palliation of symptoms is only a drink away. The main character, George Harvey Bone leads the reader into a world of drink-inflicted physical illness, and we understand it as a way of life for all the important characters. But, George has an additional illness, schizophrenia, that creates another world available only to him and to the reader. Hamilton's writing is seductive, and the reader accepts and wants to enter this second dimension. We want George to go beyond the hangover and "click" into his special psychotic state. It is in this state that George achieves a peace he cannot get any other way, safe from the chaos of hangover square and his obsession with Netta. Safety, however, is governed by evil, and readers are confronted with the peace of their own evil desires.

Hangover Square is a novel of physical and mental sickness that shows parallels with the so-called normal lives of readers. Hamilton's wonderful insight into the human comedy/tragedy makes this novel come to life even though, on the surface, readers do not feel that they have much in common with the characters. This insightful style is evident in another Hamilton novel, The Slaves of Solitude (1947). I predict that when readers enter George's two worlds, they will discover that they are only one drink and one click away from illness and madness.
3 people found this helpful
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R. J. Marsella
4.0 out of 5 stars Suspenseful, Insightful and Dark- Great Book.
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2011
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Patrick Hamilton chronicled the darker side of London life , particularly the life of those who spent a good part of that life drunk and in pubs in the 1930s. In Hangover Square, he created the character of George Harvey Bone, a large simple man who is obsessed with a woman who is part of his drinking circle and is also incredibly self centered and cruel to him. George has schizophrenia and is subject to periods of blackouts where he doesn't recall much other than a dark vision of revenge.
The plot takes the characters from London to Brighton and back as well as between two sets of friends. The drinking companions of George and Netta the object of his fixation who are equally cruel to George, take him for granted and use him comprise one group. This is contrasted with a group that revolves around an old school friend of George's whom he meets by accident and through him has a moment of reprieve and clarity as he is suddenly around people who see his Netta for who she really is and tell him.
Hamilton's writing is crisp and the ominous sense that all of this will end badly is established early in the novel. This is the second book if Hamilton's that I've read and he has quickly become one of my favorite authors.
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vs
5.0 out of 5 stars dark & tortured life in London
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2010
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George Harvey Bone has schizophrenia. Is his life dark and tortured because of that? or does he have schizophrenia because his life is dark and tortured? Life in London in 1939 for George and his peers does look dark and bleak in itself, but George seems to be much more vulnerable than anybody, and much more vulnerable than Netta, young woman he has a misfortune to be madly in love with, who has sensitivity of a fish, according to Hamilton's description.

Most of the people surrounding Bone have fun at his expense, including Netta. George does recognize this, but he has no willpower to break out of this situation, so he keeps suffering, and this mental suffering probably contributes to his schizophrenic spells, during which he nurses murderous thoughts.

This book brings to mind both Idiot and The Insulted and Humiliated by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and this is not too huge an exaggeration: Hamilton does create very powerful and gripping characters, narrative and social scenery, so comparison with Dostoevsky at least gives one a proper framework to place both Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude.

Lots of details, very clear and powerful language - this book deserves to be much better known than, say, "The Collector" by Fowles, but... when they asked Beethoven why his 8th is much less popular than his 7th, he replied: "But it's so much better, that's why!"
5 people found this helpful
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Bob Richey
3.0 out of 5 stars Before The Days of Mental Illness
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2011
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This book was published in 1941 at the early rumblings of the Second World War. The plot takes place starting in 1938 when those rumblings were only hints and the Prime Minister of the UK, Neville Chamberlain was still talking about negotiating with Mr. Hitler and there will be "peace in our time". He later said that the invasion of Poland was an aberration and did not mean much in the whole scheme of things. At the end of our book the "peace in our time" was remembered as the barrage balloons were raised in London and the Battle of Britain news replaced the invasion of Poland news.

That was all background to this story of artists and other unemployed people in the gritty Earl's Court area of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The story is truly noir and reminds me of some of the early motion pictures directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, though this story is not a mystery. Even in the reading of this book, the scenes that I imagined were in black-and-white. As I read this book, I was continuingly reminding myself that it was published in 1941 though the main theme of the plot involved a medical condition which I had not realized was really identified that early. In this case, the main character, George suffers from a condition of "near" schizophrenia. He only has a single personality, but there are times when he shifts into another reality.

I enjoyed the book, though at times, I was not sure that I would. The talent of this author and his way of building his plot and manufacturing his story structure was fascinating to me.

This is a book which had gone out of print some time ago but Europa Editions chose to bring it back into publication in 2006. That run was successful for a second reprinting in 2009. I am certainly glad that they did.
4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Adrian Page
5.0 out of 5 stars Great undiscovered novel
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2024
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This is an amazing writer who has a superb grasp of
Men’s struggle to live authentically.
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Lady Fancifull
4.0 out of 5 stars A subtle, tragi-comic tale of a good man undone by adoration, `in darkest Earl's Court'
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 14, 2014
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Patrick Hamilton is a not-quite-forgotten, admired author, who specialised in getting inside the heads of those who were disaffected, on-the-margins, or even, dangerously psychopathic - he was a stage and film writer, as well as author, and responsible for the highly charged, tightly wound, thrillers of sinister psychopathology, Gaslight, and Rope

Hangover Square was one of his most iconic novels. Set primarily in London on the very edge of, and then just at the start of, the Second World War, this follows the fortunes (pretty well unstoppably downwards) of George Harvey Bone, a not quite impoverished, weak willed man with a severe drinking problem, some undiagnosed dissociative mental health problems, and a dangerous 2 year infatuation with a hard, vicious untalented actress.

Bone is an unlikely subject to capture a reader's compassionate interest, yet he does, because despite the fact that he is someone of a definite wasted life, a bit of a bumbling, naïve and pathetic character, he is nevertheless like a lost and vulnerable puppy, possessed of great sweetness of temperament, despite his irritating flaccidity of purpose

Netta, the object of his adoration, is a beautiful and completely amoral, woman, without any charm, wit, intelligence, talent or likeability. Her one asset is her extraordinary beauty, which is clearly barely even skin-deep. Whereas Bone is a marshmallow, ineffectual, likeable drunk, Netta, and her closest crony, louche, spiteful Peter, are hard, aggressive, deeply unpleasant drunks.

The trajectory of the story is George Bone's worsening mental health problems, and the hopeless infatuation with Netta, who is completely uninterested in George, in any way, except as someone to sponge money from, and exploit.

This should be an unbearably depressing book, but instead, there is a kind of gentle humour in George, a puppyish enthusiasm and a potential for excitement and joy which carries the reader along, despite the awareness of the grim background of war on the horizon, the predictable and nasty leanings towards Fascist sympathies espoused by Netta and Peter, and George's inability to free himself from the nest of vipers he can, in some ways, clearly see.

Perhaps Hamilton's ability to make us feel George from the inside, and care about him, too, comes in part from what must have been a certain self-identification in the writer, as Hamilton himself had a disastrous relationship with alcohol, child of an alcoholic father, he died in 1962 of liver cirrhosis. He was a writer who definitely identified with the underdog, the marginalised, and the powerless in society.

J.B. Priestley in his introduction to the the Penguin Classics edition of Hangover Square, describes Hamilton as one of the best `minor novelists' writing in the interwar and beyond years. And lest that seems like damning with faint praise, it is I think fair, admiring praise.

However.........I should caution anyone who gets this edition, with the Priestley introduction to AVOID reading that introduction if you have never read Hangover Square, as foolishly, in the closing paragraph of his otherwise pertinent and interesting introduction, he reveals one of the major spoilers.
3 people found this helpful
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Greying Fox
5.0 out of 5 stars A real sense of the seamier side of life
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2013
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I bought my first Patrick Hamilton book on the basis of reviews by others, and each new book is a delight. He has a rare ability in his descriptive writing, both in conveying the most profound innermost emotions, and taking you into a world where you can almost smell the stale beer, cheap perfume and the smoke hanging on London streets on a wet November evening. These are not fast-paced, all-action novels: they will appeal to readers who want to immerse themselves deeply in a character and a lifestyle. Mesmerisingly good.
2 people found this helpful
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Nicky01
3.0 out of 5 stars Another depressing bookclub read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2013
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I read this book for book club,the characters are unusual and quirky, but I didn't like any of the more at the end than the beginning and frankly I am fed up of stereotypes of callous women seen through the eyes of inadequate men, it's too much like a sad person's idea of real life for it to be an enjoyable read. The quality of the descriptions are good however and the writing style is excellent, I just wish the content was worth the effort. Where were the believable female characters?
One person found this helpful
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Richard Lock
4.0 out of 5 stars Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2014
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Like a predecessor to McCarthy in that you struggle to find much to like in any of the main characters but also disturbing in how familiar their personalities are and identifiable their drives. Great book but don't expect to finish it with a grin on your chops but then who wants to read sentimental wishy washy drivel anyway? Hang on - don't answer that!
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