I think I've mentioned that I've been having a hard time lately concentrating on serious books. For this reason I've only just finished Patrick Hamilton's marvellous The Slaves of Solitude. It's not necessarily hard going, but it is on the dark side and takes some time getting into. It's well worth the effort, however, even if it took me longer than normal to get through and has made me late getting to the Slaves' discussion.
This is a book much deserving of a proper post, but I think I'll try and keep it short (I concentrated hard enough to finish it, though am not so sure I can write about it in the way I'd like to). Besides you can read some very articulate posts about the book here and here. In case you're not familiar with the story, I will mention a few things about it and perhaps share a quote or two.
The story revolves around the residents of a boarding house called The Rosamund Tea Rooms (having formerly been, well, tea rooms) in the small town of Thames Lockden. Although WWII is raging in the background, we get to see a very different side to it. American soldiers are there in full force getting prepared to open the second front, there is rationing and food shortages, and attention must be paid to the blackout. It's the Blitz that has sent Miss Roach to Thames Lockden after her home in London was bombed. She's a former schoolmistress and now works in a small publishing firm. On the wrong side of thirty she's a spinster, but I found her to be very sympathetic.
Along with Miss Roach the boarding house contains an odd assortment of characters living lives of shabby gentility in their closed, insulated little worlds. They seem to spend their time there or at the local pub, the River Sun. Much of the story takes place at mealtimes or while drinking in the pub, and while most of the guests are proper in their conversations and actions, two will make Miss Roach's life an utter hell. Mr. Thwaites and Vicki Kugelmann are ghastly people and provoking towards Miss Roach. They are the sort of characters you love to hate. As noted on the book blurb the story is a "recounting of an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boarding house." Will our heroine, Miss Roach, triumph in the end?
What I loved about the story is Hamilton's wonderful use of language and dialog. Aside from just being flat out nasty, Mr. Thwaites in particular and Vicki to a lesser extent would often speak in what editor David Lodge called idiolect ("language unique to an individual"). In the case of Mr. Thwaites this would be a sort of stylized, archaic English that was excessively annoying to read, but that I had to appreciate for Hamilton's cleverness. The pair would do this to egg Miss Roach on, pushing her just far enough and twisting the situation around so she would look like the foolish one.
One of the nicer guests very perceptively describes life in the boarding house:
"They didn't talk, they didn't laugh, they didn't seem to enjoy their food, they didn't seem to go out, they didn't seem to have any interests, they didn't seem to like each other much, they didn't even seem to hate each other, they didn't seem to do anything. All they seemed to do was to crawl in one by one, murmur a little to the waitress, mutter little requests to pass the salt, shift in their chairs, occasionally modestly cough or blow their noses, sit, eat, wait, eat, sit, and at last crawl out again, one by one, without a word, to heaven knew where to do heaven knew what...It was all beyond Albert Brent, who lived for the most part in London and had been in close touch with the world of affairs and the war."
It's this same gentleman who contemplates the boarding house's dining room and calls it "this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!"
Lodge calls the story a microcosm of a macrocosm--the tiny world within the boarding house vs. the larger world at war and they even had parallel themes of good vs. evil. Very clever indeed!