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Patrick Hamilton: the tormented genius whose play inspired Patrick Hamilton: the tormented genius whose play inspired

Yeah, it could've been great, Pat. It probably would've been. But patience is never one of my virtues, and this is an especially bad week. These are some of the famous quotes that were running through my mind while reading Hangover Square. The book is set in England just before World War 2. Bone - a tall, overweight, alcoholic and sensitive man is madly in love with Netta, an aspiring actress. But the cruel Netta has no interest in Bone and viciously humiliates him every chance that she gets while also borrowing money from him.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. She is just using him and he gets nothing in exchange. But every deception leaves a little teardrop of bitterness… As you get further and further into the book you get deeper and deeper into his head. You come to fully understand what he is gong through. The author’s ability to show the reader George’s world is what makes the book very good. I once wrote a review for this one and I thought the best way to describe this novel would be by calling it ‘A diary of obsession’ because simply that was the first thing that came to my mind at the time. Today I’m not so sure because it feels like more than that. Certainly obsession plays an important part in it, but isn’t it also about other things? About what happens with the person obsessed? Does it not also explore what happens with the person who is the object of obsession? Doesn’t it propose some interesting question? It certainly does and it got me thinking at the time. Who is the real victim? What are dynamics of such a relationship and how do they affect the persons involved? Moreover, the question of other people comes in. Our protagonist and the girl he is head over heels with are not the only characters in this novel. Hangover Square is a darkly comical, rarely sober, atmospheric trip through the streets and pubs of prewar London.

Hangover Square - Wikipedia

published in London Fictions, Five Leaves: 2013, and posted here in October 2016; minor reformatting January 2018] Solomon, Aubrey (2002). Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History. Scarecrow Press, p. 220 ISBN 978-0-8108-4244-1 He has suffered these mental wipe-outs since boyhood, but lately they have been getting worse. Single, lonely, a depressed wanderer through the twilit seediness of Earl’s Court, George survives on a private income that fatally allows him to numb his wretchedness with drink. Hangover Square is a metaphorical place, a stopover on the long and lonely pub-crawl to alcoholic oblivion

Mank, Gregory William (1994). Hollywood Cauldron: Thirteen Horror Films from the Genre's Golden Age. McFarland & Company, pp. 327-28 ISBN 0-7864-1112-0. 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.

Hangover Square, First Edition: Books - AbeBooks Hangover Square, First Edition: Books - AbeBooks

The American composer Stephen Sondheim has cited Bernard Herrmann's score for Hangover Square as a major influence on his musical Sweeney Todd. [7] Reception [ edit ] That said, who exactly is George Harvey Bone? Or to put the question differently: why does Hamilton make this amiable, ineffective, insecure, warm-hearted but hapless man the protagonist of his novel? George of England, but apparently no slayer of dragons. This George is more of a Dobbin. In some respects he is quite like George Bowling, the protagonist of ‘George Orwell’s’ almost exact contemporary Coming Up For Air. I put Orwell’s name in quotes merely to remind us that Eric Blair’s choice of pseudonym has surely to be read as a token of his desire to be a kind of spokesman for England. George speaks for itself. And Orwell is the name of a small river that runs into the sea near Southwold, where Eric Blair’s parents retired after years in the Colonial Service. The opening of Hangover Square is set at Hunstanton, Christmas time 1938, where George is staying at the house of an aged aunt. Same sea-coast, though this time Norfolk rather than Suffolk. But neither, surely, much to do with England in the late 1930s. This series Sara Cox and her celebrity guests review the best new releases, reminisce about their favourite classics and reveal their own comfort reads. Between The Covers Books List Series 5 – Book List New Releases The whole plot – if that is the word - of this thing for 98% of the whole book can be summed up in 2:37 by Frank and Nancy Sinatra:

References

Laird Cregar, a fan of the original novel, encouraged 20th Century Fox to buy the film rights. Fox agreed, but wanted to recreate the success that it had enjoyed the previous year with The Lodger, and made several changes to the story, including the main character's personality and the setting. Cregar, George Sanders and John Brahm, who had all worked together in The Lodger, signed on with the project.

Hangover Square (film) - Wikipedia Hangover Square (film) - Wikipedia

It’s possible, I suppose, to interpret Bone’s response to Chamberlain’s words as prompted by King Street (the CP headquarters) which, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on 23rd August, took the line that the war against Hitler was an Imperialist one and should be ignored by Marxists. But in his biography, Nigel Jones says that Hamilton never accepted this line and was, for all his Communist sympathies, Churchillian in his patriotism. Not that Jones has anything to say about this moment. My own view is that Bone is understandably irked by Chamberlain’s routine piety. Anyway, by his double murder he has brought speedy destruction on the basically rotten life of which he had for too long been a part and which now requires his own death. For suddenly death is everywhere.

I hope you’ve found this complete Between The Covers book list helpful. I’ll keep the list updated with every new series. He was sane enough. If you didn’t count the ‘dead’ moods, he was sane enough. In fact he was probably too sane, too normal. Netta herself is sexually attracted to the fascist movement and its fetishistic totems: “She liked the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots, the swastikas, the shirts.” The political is contiguous with the personal. Her coarseness, her casual duplicity, her contempt for the weak and helpless – if Netta is not an actual fascist, she is a spiritual adherent, a ruthless foe of all that is decent and gentle and cultured. As George, in his abjection, pleads with her: “Can’t you be civil? Can’t you look at me and say something civil?” The time line of the story is a bit relative, yet it fits the novel. You read fist chapter and then after a few chapters you see another "first chapter" and before you start saying ‘wtf’ just remember that you kind of have to connect some things for yourself. More than once in the novel, you will have some connecting to do. However, it is not difficult to do it. This article appears in the book London Fictions , edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White - and published by Five Leaves .