Baron Kurtz
I'll Lock Up
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I believe he's generally not very well known. But, if you're interested in midcentury British writers, you have to know Hamilton.
it was actually the thread on Céline that led me to thinking about Hamilton again. I read Hangover Square a long time ago, and it's a fantastic book, and I know Rope, obviously (He wrote the play from which the Hitchcock movie was made), and i've just started reading The Slaves of Solitude, which is apparently his masterpiece.
But why Céline would make me think of Hamilton? They share an uncommon bleakness of outlook, and the drive to tell things as they are/were without sugar coating. Hamilton's view of England in the 1930s and 1940s is resolutely not the sugar coated, all pull together glibness one mostly reads in authors from those years. His is a landscape of sorrow, terror, loneliness, and bleak bleak bleak. And in among it all, he has comic and absurd characters and scenes reminiscent of Dickens, and the equal of anything Greene or Orwell produced. Those two names I don't use lightly. Hamilton would rightly be listed as an equal of those two authors.
If this is the first time you've heard of him, I urge yo to read him.
Incidentally, he has produced the best and most evocative description of London that i've read to date. It's as true today as it always was.
London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in is own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.
The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.
Anyone else have thoughts on Patrick Hamilton?
bk
it was actually the thread on Céline that led me to thinking about Hamilton again. I read Hangover Square a long time ago, and it's a fantastic book, and I know Rope, obviously (He wrote the play from which the Hitchcock movie was made), and i've just started reading The Slaves of Solitude, which is apparently his masterpiece.
But why Céline would make me think of Hamilton? They share an uncommon bleakness of outlook, and the drive to tell things as they are/were without sugar coating. Hamilton's view of England in the 1930s and 1940s is resolutely not the sugar coated, all pull together glibness one mostly reads in authors from those years. His is a landscape of sorrow, terror, loneliness, and bleak bleak bleak. And in among it all, he has comic and absurd characters and scenes reminiscent of Dickens, and the equal of anything Greene or Orwell produced. Those two names I don't use lightly. Hamilton would rightly be listed as an equal of those two authors.
If this is the first time you've heard of him, I urge yo to read him.
Incidentally, he has produced the best and most evocative description of London that i've read to date. It's as true today as it always was.
London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in is own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.
The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.
Anyone else have thoughts on Patrick Hamilton?
bk
