Dave's Book Blog: "The Plains of Cement" by Patrick Hamilton

Monday 24 April 2023

"The Plains of Cement" by Patrick Hamilton

This book is part of the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. It is about Ella, the barmaid who works with Bob the waiter at The Midnight Bell public house; Bob's story is told in The Midnight Bell.

Ella is being courted by an elderly customer, Mr Eccles. Ella doesn't love him but she is considering marriage because he says he is comfortably off. He woos her (there is a great deal of comedy in this), taking her to the theatre, and soon, because she can't but be polite, so that she never has the opportunity for telling him how she feels, or even asking him a direct question about his intentions, he assumes that they are engaged. Soon they are eight weeks away from marriage and Ella is desperately seeking escape routes.

Hamilton is great at dialogue. He replicates perfectly the patterns of everyday speech and shows how the inherent flaws in interpersonal communication can lead to assumptions and misunderstandings. There are moments in this book that are really very funny; it is the only Hamilton novel I have read so far (four) that contains humour.

Selected quotes:

"She was neither startlingly attractive, not startlingly ugly. She could attract no attention at first sight; she could therefore never hope to attract much attention." (Ch 1)
"There is a great deal of the tomb in a bedroom; all passions, delights, schemings, ambitions, triumphs, must be taken back at night to these caves of cold arbitration." (Ch 5)
"As an old man he was barely responsible for his rage. Old men were known and allowed to be irritable and to go into rages about nothing. ... Because they were old there was not extracted from them the same duties of self-control towards their fellow-beings as there was from others." (Ch 6)
"He had an extraordinary way of even opening a door as though he was slamming it." (Ch 14)
"It was Sunday. By ten o'clock Ella was busy at her tasks in the bar, wondering what it was, breathing in the air, which made it so overwhelmingly, all-permeatingly Sunday - so that she would have known it was Sunday if all the almanacal evidence in the world had spoken to the contrary." (Ch 21)
"Sunday sunshine served to intensify rather than remove her depression of spirits ... making her think of God - a subject which she could still not get the hang of and which always dejected her." (Ch 21)
"He had lost much of his self-consciousness, and talked less about her and more about herself - his likes and dislikes, his approvals and disapprovals - rather with an air of giving her a Short Course in himself for her present convenience and future reference." (Ch 21)
"The innumerable, irrelevant, base, rebellious, unscrupulous, egoistic thoughts and impulses springing up on all sides from her subconscious mind." (Ch 23)
"In addition to Lying Down, and Taking it Easy, and being Helped, there was a vitally important sentimental rule that people in these circumstances should, periodically and with great ostentation, be Left." (Ch 23)
"Sometimes she wished she could give up thinking altogether." (Ch 23)
"It seemed ... that the gods had at last convicted human nature of its crimes and thrown them all into a vast cold dungeon away from the light of day forever." (Ch 27)