"Hangover Square" by Patrick Hamilton

Hangover Square is written by the man who also wrote the play Gaslight, itself responsible for the term 'gaslighting'. J B Priestley described the author as "an unhappy man who needed whisky as a car needs petrol". 

The protagonist of Hangover Square, George Bone, suffers from some sort of Jekyll and Hyde personality (the author introduces the book with the dictionary definition of schizophrenia). Normally George is a rather ineffectual drunkard, hopelessly in love with an actress called Netta who uses his infatuation to humiliate him, to 'borrow' money from him, and to use his connections to try and get close to an important theatrical agent. But George will sometimes (without warning or any obvious trigger) 'click' into a sort of fugue state in which he hates Netta and schemes to murder her.

The story is set in the months leading up to the start of the Second World War, principally in pubs and rented rooms in Earls Court, with a couple of forays into Brighton. Most of the characters are drunks with no visible means of support; one is an ex-fascist who has spent time in prison for killing someone with his motorcar while drunk-driving. The protagonist lives in a 'hotel' (more of a rooming house) on the rapidly-diminishing proceeds of a win on the football pools. There is an atmosphere of genteel poverty and general seediness, a sort of middle-class version of the life depicted in the early chapters of The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell.

The bulk of the narration is from the point of view of George, although there are chapters in which the story is told from the perspective of other characters, including an anonymous 'young man'. George's narration is virtually 'stream of consciousness' and reminded me (especially given how much he vacillates) of Hunger by Knut Hamsun. It is particularly interesting for its description of the fugue state in which the murderous personality exists, and the for transition between the two. He uses a small number of descriptions of this, and recycles them. For example:

• "It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead." (1.1)
• "In the line of telephone booths there were a few other people locked and lit up in glass, like waved fruit, or Crown jewels ... and he went in and became like them - a different sort of person in a different sort of world - a muffled, urgent, anxious, private, ghostly world, composed not of human beings but of voices, disembodied communications." (2.3)
• "It was as though he had gone suddenly deaf - mentally deaf. It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard, and the outer world had become dim and dead. It was as though one had gone into a sound-proof telephone booth and shut the door tightly on oneself." (3.6)
• "It was as though his head were a five-shilling Kodak camera, and somebody had switched over the little trigger that makes the exposure. ... But instead of an exposure having been made the opposite had happened - an inclosure - a shutting down, a locking in. A moment before his head, his brain, were out in the world seeing, hearing, sensing objects directly; now they were enclosed behind glass(like Crown jewels, like Victorian wax fruit), behind a film ... a film behind which all things and people moved eerily, without colour, vivacity or meaning, grimly, puppet-like, without motive or conscious volition of their own." (7.1)
• "It was as though he had dived into a swimming-bath and hit his head on the bottom, and was floating about, bewildered and inaudible to himself, in hushed green depths." (Last.1)

Selected quotes

• "Netta. The tangled net of her hair - the dark net - the brunette. The net in which he was caught - netted. Nettles. The wicked poison-nettles from which had been brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles. She stung and wounded him with words from her red mouth. Nets. Fishing-nets. Mermaid's nets. Bewitchment. Syrens - the unearthly beauty of the sea. Nets. Nest. To nestle. To nestle against her. Test. Breast. In her net. Netta." (1.4)
• "He smiled again, and looked at Peter so that he didn't have to look at her - in very much the same way as a shy person, having been introduced to a stranger by a friend, looks hard at his friend while the three of them talk, makes his friend's eyes his anchor." (1.6)
• "It was as though she were a small amateur wireless station, and he alone was tuned in to her and listening." (2.1)
• "He scanned the headlines gloomily. 'TRAINS CRASH IN SNOW STORM: 85 DEAD, 300 INJURED'. He experienced a momentary feeling that he was about to be shocked, and then he saw that the news came from Budapest, which meant that he did not have to be shocked." (2.3)
• "This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left" (4.2)
• "She had at one time hoped to make good at films ... but she was unable to relate this ambition with the labour requisite for its maturing. She expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty." (5.3)
• "Oh - how the summer had crashed, and he with it!" (7.3)
• "What fate was it which made him always walking, always by himself?" (7.3)
• "He entered the dense bottle-neck of human beings by the ticket-collector. ... He couldn't understand what all these people, none of them about to kill anybody, were up to ... They had no reality: nothing had any reality. There was only his plan ... His plan was all he had to stick to, in a confused, meaningless, planless world." (7.5)
• "The police could meddle, could get him, even in Maidenhead, if he arrived there before dark. He knew the rules all right." (7.7)

An intriguing exploration of a mentally ill man lost in a hostile world.

April 2023; 281 pages

This review was written by the author of

Bally and Bro, Motherdarling and The Kids of God