Crack!
George Bone has always suffered from a psychiatric condition
that leaves him with a split personality. He lurches from one to another
unexpectedly with a terrifying physical crack that leaves him disorientated and
unable immediately to remember what he is doing. He is not just an unreliable
narrator, he is a pair of them, contradicting himself, backtracking on his
intentions, sometimes almost free of the curse his condition has created. If
Billy Pilgrim had come unstuck in time, then Bone has come unstuck in himself.
In his ‘dead moods’ Bone wants to kill Netta, a spoilt chancer,
third-rate English film actress and alcoholic, who has strung him along and
ruined him. However, once back into his normal mind, he loves her like a little
puppy. Both men are Bone, and Netta is brazen, amoral and easily dislikeable.
She even uses Bone to get to his old school friend, Johnny Littlejohn, who now
works for a big film producer that Netta wants to exploit.
This is an odd book because Bone in either personality is
hardly a hero and there is a stagey tension as to whether he will kill Netta or
marry her and take her to Maidenhead, a town that has a peculiar significance
in the narrative which is never explained. There is a hint of a lost, possibly
dead sister, connected to a land of lost contentment, based in Maidenhead.
Hamilton divides the work into many books, each prefaced
with quotes, mainly from John Milton’s verse play Samson Agonistes. Samson lost his strength to Delilah through love
and strong drink and is left ‘Eyeless in Gaza/ At the mill with slaves’. He can
only redeem himself, like Samson, by pulling the temple down on himself.
Hamilton was a successful playwright and novelist from the
1920s to the 1950s. His play Rope was
produced on BBC television in 1939 filmed by Hitchcock in 1948 with James
Stewart. Gas Light played
successfully in the US and was made into a film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman.
So while Hamilton was long established as a writer of creepy
narratives, Hangover Square brings to
life the demi-monde of Earl’s Court, contriving a trail of perpetual drink
around London in the spring and summer of 1939 in the few weeks before the War.
The watering holes of that area and the small array of tube stations, the
burnt-out ends of smoky days, sad cafés and cheap hotels that bind it together.
The novel is made stranger because we know what George often
doesn’t, as his ability to understand the world around him fluctuates each time
he switches his state of consciousness. Meanwhile we know what he doesn’t, that
the bohemian life he leads is neither desirable nor durable, and the novel’s
setting in the months before the start of World War Two in September 1939
reinforces the idea of Bone symbolising all that was wrong with Britain in the
1930s: weak, vacillating and schizophrenic. TS Eliot called the people of that
time The Hollow Men, and you can see why.
