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The Slaves of Solitude

by Patrick Hamilton, David Lodge (Introduction)

4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 · rating details · 488 ratings · 84 reviews

England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames L...more

Paperback, 256 pages

Published February 20th 2007 by NYRB Classics (first published 1947)

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Jan 04, 2009 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: only the lonely; recovering alcoholics; old maids

Recommended to Jessica by: jay dickson

Shelves: groups-of-people, kind-of-depressing, favorites, substance-related-disorders

Anyone who actually listens to my opinions and bases their library picks on my star ratings (hi, mom!) deserves to know what the unusual fifth star represents. My stars make zero effort at even an obviously subjective judgment of how "good" I think a book is. Instead, the fourth star is a measure of how much I personally enjoy a book and find it engaging, while my elusive fifth star is granted when I feel a book has made enough of an impression on me that it's demonstrably changed my life.

I hone...more Anyone who actually listens to my opinions and bases their library picks on my star ratings (hi, mom!) deserves to know what the unusual fifth star represents. My stars make zero effort at even an obviously subjective judgment of how "good" I think a book is. Instead, the fourth star is a measure of how much I personally enjoy a book and find it engaging, while my elusive fifth star is granted when I feel a book has made enough of an impression on me that it's demonstrably changed my life.

I honestly don't know that I've ever related as much to a character in a book as I did to Miss Roach in The Slaves of Solitude. In a way, that seems like a crazily personal thing to admit to strangers and loved ones on the internet, but I suppose that horse escaped from the barn a long time ago.... While I'm making inappropriately intimate online pronouncements, I'll reveal that I read this on Christmas, which perhaps not incidentally was the day of an annual break-down-and-cry-noisily-for-forty-minutes-or-so-in-the-empty-bathtub- whilst-suddenly-overcome-by-the-immutable-inevitability-of-human-loneliness - sort-of-existential-crisis little thing that can happen sometimes around the holidays when I don't wind up going over to the Cratchits' for figgy pudding and make the mistake of staying home alone.... Anyways, this Christmas, after I finally stopped sobbing and decided to pull myself out of the tub and put some clothes on and try to behave like an ordinary atheistic Jew with plenty of lovely friends and a wonderful family and no right at all to freak out on such a ridiculous occasion, I was overcome with gratitude towards Patrick Hamilton for so perfectly conveying that very sense of inescapable and excruciating loneliness from which we all spend 364 days of the year trying to shield ourselves.... Thank heavens I had the rest of this book to turn to on that awful day! Of course, later on, it occurred to me that Mr. Hamilton's novel might have been at least partially responsible not just for pulling me out of my Yuletide meltdown, but also for pushing me into it, so maybe I needn't have felt so grateful.... Still. Even if the book was the cause and not just the cure, is that really so bad? It's probably healthful to confront, on occasion, one's unavoidable, soul-crushing solitude, and there are doubtless worse ways to get there -- and back -- than this wonderful book.

Okay, so I need to admit the possibility that another reader might emerge a bit perplexed from a foray into Slaves of Solitude, scratching his or her head and saying, "Well, Jessica, it's not bad or anything, it's fine, but it is sort of the book version of one of those weird, stiff, old colorless BBC comedies that are kind of oddly funny in that strange British way that neither of us really get because we're American. Isn't it true that you've got your knickers (so to speak) in a twist over some shriveled up Limeys crankily insulting one another over boiled meat?" And yeah, I mean, I guess Slaves of Solitude is kind of like that. It's set in a boarding house during World War II, in a tiny suburban village where our heroine Miss Roach has gone to escape from London during the Blitz. That is pretty old BBC comedy already, yeah?

Please do not be fooled by the New York Review Books' sexy, stylish cover! No one in this book is good-looking or has any allure whatsoever, at all. This is a novel about drab, miserable people who are trapped in their cramped and uncomfortable sad little lives. Most of the novel is Ms. Roach being bullied by the villainous dull, pompous, elderly Mr. Thwaits, over shitty WWII-era English dinners in the boarding house dining room. The unattractively aging Ms. Roach chokes down unremitting rounds of "gin and french" with her American Lieutenant and German frenemy; she takes the train to and from work, and stolidly, despairingly, quietly, bravely, gets up day after bleak, hungover, blacked-out day of an indeterminable war, an indeterminable life.... ughhhh..... I mean, I suppose it's sort of bleak, in a way. But it's also pretty funny! Ha ha! Oh, I loved it. Someone else should read this and tell me if it's at all as great as I thought it was, or if it just really struck a chord for some reason. I honestly can't remember the last time I related to strongly to any character in fiction! It also provided some perspective. I mean, at least we're not in the middle of a world war at the moment, right? Jesus.... Also, this has some of the best descriptions I've read of what it's like to be drinking a lot, around other people who're also drinking a lot, and everyone's just so miserable and exhausted and awful.... Great!

Okay, so here's a wonderful excerpt, in which Hamilton puts the experience of waking up in the morning in a singularly harsh new light:

Even then the guests did not wake into full life. Instead, there was a dazed period in which each guest, turning in bed, renewed his acquaintanceship with his own problems and the fact that a war was being waged all over the world, and, finally rising and flinging back the curtains, contemplated the awful scene of wreckage caused by his sleep. The feeling of the morning after the night before is not a sensation endured by the dissolute only: every morning, for every human being, is in some sort a morning after the night before: the dissolute merely experience it in a more intense degree. There is an air of debauch about tossed bed-clothes, stale air, cold hot-water bottles, and last night's cast-off clothing, from which even the primmest of maiden ladies cannot hope to escape. Sleep is gross, a form of abandonment, and it is impossible for anyone to awake and observe its sordid consequences save with a faint sense of recent dissipation, of minute personal disquiet and remorse. (pp 62-63)

AAARGHH!!! If you don't think that's great, you're a nutball!

I'm gonna read Hangover Square next. I can't wait!(less)

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Apr 07, 2013 Mariel rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: tuning forks

Recommended to Mariel by: clip clopping of cloven hooves

'Old Roach.' 'Old Cockrock.' Driven out on to the streets, and walking about in the blackness, as she had done that night, months ago, before all this had begun. 'Old Cockroach.' That was her. That was how they had started with her, and that was how it would always be. She might have known this- she might have known better than to have suspected the possibility of any brighter destiny.
If she hadn't cried herself out already, she could go back and cry. But she had cried herself out. It was all o

...more

'Old Roach.' 'Old Cockrock.' Driven out on to the streets, and walking about in the blackness, as she had done that night, months ago, before all this had begun. 'Old Cockroach.' That was her. That was how they had started with her, and that was how it would always be. She might have known this- she might have known better than to have suspected the possibility of any brighter destiny.
If she hadn't cried herself out already, she could go back and cry. But she had cried herself out. It was all over now- even tears.

It isn't that bad, or the end of the world. If you woke up light enough that day it won't destroy the well being in yourself you've stored up until you can get home to your safe place in the evening. If you're lucky you can get to your car in time, your book will be good enough and the music will continue in your head as you walk back inside to the soul sucking assholes you have to put up with day in and day out. Maybe everyone won't believe that YOU said the nasty things about them that the true culprit blamed on you. Most of my days are spent in the company of a little prick I call in my head "the turtle". I try not to think about the turtle too much once I am free. It is hard enough to live with it as it is. It is enough to say that he sucks. A description of if Mr. Smithers from The Simpsons got his wish and screwed his love Mr. Burns for his love child and that hell spawn grew up to be my coworker will give you some of the bad hotel art picture (think turtles playing poker. Turtle likes to let poker chips fall out of his pocket to initiate bragging about some silly amount he won playing that weekend. I don't want to talk about turtle now. See how they get in your head?) Sometimes, though, it is so hard to go back and face it again. I feel pathetic to be an adult woman and in the same bullied place I was when I was in elementary school and all other institutions thereafter. Miss Roach has to live with her tormentors at home in the boardinghouse she stays in after fleeing a bombed out WWII London. She doesn't exactly sit there and take it, either (nor do I). But it sucks. It is where you have to live. It is exhausting to put on a brave face and then put it no again when it has fallen from the effort it takes to maintain it.

Mr. Thwaite is the loathsome cartoonish character I can't imagine anyone would take seriously. He's frightening because he's always there, a large figure with his dining room utensils to thump the tables in his tantrums. A king's trident in one fist and Ursula's body language of fat man breast wiggles to intimidate the younger women in the crowd of cowering retiring lonely women. Shovel it in and talk, talk, talk. His life must be faced every day too. I'd feel sorry for him if I was afraid that I would ever be him on the day he sees himself in the eyes of those poor old women. He may be rich, or at least has enough to avoid worries of a struggle. That doesn't mean he slithers any less. To get so drunk to make a pass it must be sad indeed to be that stupid man. Each end of his hole is a dark hole devoid of reason or empathy. I couldn't abide his conversation for one night let alone let him control everyone's night after night as they do in the Rosamond Tea Rooms. If I were sitting at the table with him I might have exchanged a meaningful smirk with Miss Roach over his buffooning. Once in a while one of the ladies might notice enough to meekly come to her aid. It isn't nothing when she's told that "It'll all come out in the wash" when it has become too much, too cold to live with the repression any longer. But I kind of had it with Hamilton informing me that Miss Roach was secretly their heroine for standing up to the man in her small way. She was their heroine because she dared to leave the home for walks or visits to a pub. It didn't have to be that cold, did it?

And, observing the purification of Mr. Prest, Miss Roach herself felt purified. She would have been surprised, a few months ago, if someone had told her that she was one day going to be purified by Mr. Prest- that that forlorn, silent man in the corner, that morose wearer of plus-fours, that slinker to his room, that stroller to the station, that idler and hanger-about in bars, had within him the love of small children and the gift of public purification!

Sometimes a smile on someone's face can make it easier to imagine that it is enough. It will be true what they say about tomorrow being another day. I liked this touch in The Slaves of Solitude in the bullying of Miss Roach (and in different ways) of the other residents. Everyone isn't like Mr. Thwaites and the hideous American Lieutenant who urges and takes and drinks and demands. He has a glass in his hand to be filled while the (probably by not that much) older man has a knife to pick up whatever bits of flesh you will let him take. I was more irritated that Miss Roach tries harder to forgive the men (especially the slutty American) for their own sakes while her inner resistance to tyranny from her so-called German friend Vicky felt more uncomfortable within her from her vision of herself. If you're going to imagine support from others because you need it okay. But is it for other people if you must win over one party (I liked that her means of winning against Vicky were modest ones. A better boarding house, a small sum of money. This lack of grandstanding suited my feeling of anti table thumping nicely)? Did Vicky owe Miss Roach any more than the others did? Vicky is the character with the least space to inhabit of her own. I can imagine how wormy it must feel in her skin too. The edge that would lighten if she felt good enough about herself in comparison to a woman like Miss Roach (there must have been others. As a kid some of my favorite stories of my mother's were about the gross guys she dated purposely so the girl friend she had who only wanted my mom's boyfriends would date them. Miss Roach must've been raised to think she was no good unless she ignored anything but the palatable). It would suck to be Vicky too. I don't like her one bit. Did she see Miss Roach as an English busy body who looked down on the German immigrant when her nationality wasn't a comfortable place to be? I could have imagined another side to Vicky in an easier time. Maybe the friendliness came easier and was more freely given. It was easy for everyone to do what they did. Maybe there were other beds to go to before more days of I thought my life was going to mean more than this.

Something I experienced a lot with bullies was the misery of wondering what it was about me that made me deserve that kind of attention. I liked that The Slaves of Solitude kept this forced down inside, peeking out in the teaching days of Miss Roach or whenever her cruel housemates call her Roachy (if you told them you hated it they would only do it more), even if that means missing one of the crueler parts of bullying. You have to protect yourself, right? The everything is going to be alright feeling (even if it isn't because there will be lots more cold days like those) was because of that. That's the part that stays with you even when the bullies are gone. So if no one else ever says anything you can protect yourself. Miss Roach does. It might make you feel sick to cry but why not and then get up after when you're done. Saying that doesn't help when it is happening, though. It's actually kind of annoying to hear "let it roll off your back". You already know that. When does it ever end? At least it isn't the end of the world. At least everyone isn't like that but it also sucks they all sat at those stupid dinner tables every night and let that stupid old man silence them. What were they afraid of? I am torn between finding it comforting this slight reassuring feel and relief it just admits it sucks. I probably wouldn't have found Miss Roach that compelling (she tries too hard to stay under covers of what you are supposed to think) if she didn't just want things to be warm so openly. I'm not torn about that. I liked that a lot. That helped a lot on a bad turtle day.(less)

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Oct 21, 2011 Jennifer (aka EM) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: lonely-hearts-club

An interesting read after Brooklyn. The Slaves of Solitude (I just wrote that as "salves" of solitude, which would be a very different thing, wouldn't it?) - anyhoo - Miss Roach and TSoS's boarding house are in many ways (but not all ways) polar opposites of Eilis Lacey and her Brooklyn abode, and yet the experience with the one plays really nicely off of the other.

I take note of this weird alchemy that occurs as books go from my to-read to my currently-reading list, because it's been happening...more

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Jan 22, 2013 Nigeyb rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What a marvellous book. I've enjoyed four other Patrick Hamilton novels (Hangover Square and the Gorse Trilogy) and this is right up there with the best. Hamilton returns to some of his familiar themes: London, the War, and fascism. Set in 1943 it deals with the ordinary lives of ordinary people. As well as the battles facing Britain, there is one closer to home. The battle between the novel's protagonist Miss Roach, a shy spinster in her thirties, and the monstrous Mr Thwaites, with whom she ha...more

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Apr 10, 2008 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Here’s a buried treasure restored to the light of day. Hamilton, who is best known these days for one of the great drinking books, Hangover Square, wrote The Slaves of Solitude some years later on the other side of the War, and brings a more measured, benevolent sensibility to the book, as well as a far more sympathetic and sober heroine in the decent, oft bewildered Miss Roach. Not that there’s a dearth of drinking, especially at the hands of an American Lieutenant stationed in a London suburb...more

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Oct 17, 2011 Patrick Johns rated it 5 of 5 stars

I normally start off by pointing out a few grammatical errors, stylistic faults, inconsistencies, factual errors, or references to non existent pieces of classical music. But I am afraid this is one book I am unable to fault. I actually loved this book, the characters, the atmosphere, the visualization, the structure and probably most of all the language, especially the dialogue.

Obviously one is reminded of Graham Greene – although this lacks the violence and explicit menace of say Brighton Rock...more I normally start off by pointing out a few grammatical errors, stylistic faults, inconsistencies, factual errors, or references to non existent pieces of classical music. But I am afraid this is one book I am unable to fault. I actually loved this book, the characters, the atmosphere, the visualization, the structure and probably most of all the language, especially the dialogue.

Obviously one is reminded of Graham Greene – although this lacks the violence and explicit menace of say Brighton Rock. I am also reminded of 50s novels by George Orwell, eg Keep The Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter – which portray a similar uniquely English gloom, depression and stoic perseverance which existed during the War and post war years. “Hanging on in Silent Desperation is the English Way” is a phrase from a well known pop song of the 70s and it applies perfectly to Miss Roach.

I was also reminded of Ian McEwan, eg On Chesil Beach and parts of Atonement and maybe Tim Winton. However the striking thing for me about The Slaves is that the whole book deals with the events of a few weeks. We are given hardly any of the characters history – who their parents are, how they were mistreated in school, when they first fell in love or had sex (probably never for Miss Roach – but we are not sure!) – which is in complete contrast to say Ian McEwan or most contemporary authors who generally tell you everything. Similarly we are not given an unraveling of the next 20 years in the last 5 pages – something that others have commented on as being irritating and a cop out in other books. Instead we are cryptically told the February blitz is just around the corner and left to draw our own conclusions. I love this.

Things I particularly liked about this book: the characters of Mr Thwaites in the opening scene made me lol. eg “I keeps my counsel like a wise old bird”, “I hae me doots” and Vicky: “Come on Roachy, be sporty! You’re not sporty”. For Mr Thwaites I can’t help visualising the character of Philip's grandfather (Wally Thomas) in The Singing Detective.

I loved the bit where the Lieutenant (“her American”) rings Miss Roach up after being invisible for 2 weeks and invites her out to dinner. Then he casually asks her to bring her German friend along. Surely the appropriate response to this is: “go and fuck yourself”. As Choupette says of Jane Eyre: "I just wished she'd get a spine and tell that stupid St. John to fuck off" - but as we all agree, young ladies didnt' say fuck off before 1973.

I was intrigued by the bit where she goes to ask the Doctor was it possible the push could have killed Mr Thwaites. So we have the doctor frantically trying to work out what she wants him to say – and luckily he gets it right. He could easily have said “Well there are documented cases of a fall accelerating the onset of an illness which could have remained dormant for much longer”. How different would the resolution of the book have been in this case? Miss Roach would have sunk back into hole of self doubt and despair and one would think she would not have had the confidence and energy to start a new life- as she did. So I am interested in whether it is the Doctor’s duty to give a version of the “truth” that is beneficial to the patients well being? Or should they even be empowered to make such a judgment? Tricky ground indeed! The main point is that choice of words at certain moments in time can have such a profound influence on people’s lives.

There are many astute observations like the fact that when someone introduces two acquaintances who didn’t previously know each other they often end up ganging up on the first person – united by knowledge of that person. I also loved the quote on p245: “The madness of Christmas is not to be resisted by any human means. It either stealthily creeps or crudely batters its way into every fastness or fortress of prudence all over the land”. Everyone who has spent Christmas in the UK will understand this - I am thinking of getting Xmas cards made up with this verse inside this year.
(less)

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Nov 13, 2011 JSou rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to JSou by: David

Shelves: favo-u-rites, nyrb

Who knew Patrick Hamilton had such a rough, crazy life? Here's a few nuggets I read in his author bio after opening the cover:

His father was a bullying alcoholic comedian and historical novelist; his mother, a sometime singer.

After his mother withdrew him from Westminster School at the age of fifteen...

In 1927 Hamilton fell unhappily in love with a prostitute...

In 1932, he was badly injured and permanently disfigured after being hit by a car.

Hamilton died of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney fai...more

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Sep 07, 2010 F.R. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When I say this is a small novel, I do not mean it in a pejorative sense. Hamilton deliberately sets out to look at a small world, a goldfish bowl of human life as it were. The setting is a boarding house in Thames Lockdon (or Henley on Thames, as it is in reality) during the war, with various strangers put together and forced to find a polite compatibility. However, over time tensions start to rise. Despite the World War raging outside, this is a book that deals with the small issues and confli...more When I say this is a small novel, I do not mean it in a pejorative sense. Hamilton deliberately sets out to look at a small world, a goldfish bowl of human life as it were. The setting is a boarding house in Thames Lockdon (or Henley on Thames, as it is in reality) during the war, with various strangers put together and forced to find a polite compatibility. However, over time tensions start to rise. Despite the World War raging outside, this is a book that deals with the small issues and conflicts which build up between people. And in avoiding – for the most part – the overly dramatic, it really does conjure up an environment of trapped and thwarted emotions.

The main protagonist is Enid Roach (although she hates her first name), an averagely attractive lady who is close to reaching her forties. A spinster then, in the parlance of the times. It’s her voice we hear most, as she deals with the tensions around her as well as a possible romance. Perhaps to the modern ear she could sound somewhat whiny and irritatingly unsure of herself, but I think the author probably does capture the voice of a lady who has seen the world change so much and is no longer sure of her place in it.

A number of Goodreads commentators have also picked out the character of Mr Thwaites, and he really is the stand out figure of this book. A schoolyard bully who has been transported into old age and the kind of environment in which he could wreak havoc; a man who has found the knack of being rude and offensive in the most civil way possible. Despite him being a monster, Hamilton manages to keep him an absolutely recognisable human being – and that somehow just makes him scarier.

“His Masterpiece” it says on the front of my edition, a quote from Francis Wyndham. And yet I don’t think it’s as good as ‘Hangover Square’. This is a superbly written study of a claustrophobic and insular world, but it’s very much of its time. ‘Hangover Square’, despite being written slightly earlier, feels the far more contemporary – and better – novel.(less)

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May 22, 2013 Patrick rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book has that same quality of the sordid that I find so compelling in the works of Somerset Maugham; I don’t mean that the story itself is a dirty one, but rather that the author’s interests lie in the basest human impulses and motivations. He is interested in great failures of idealism, and in pursuing them he delves deep into loneliness and anxiety and drinking and depression. It is heavy stuff, but never dour – his style is flexible, funny and blade-light. You have the impression through...more This book has that same quality of the sordid that I find so compelling in the works of Somerset Maugham; I don’t mean that the story itself is a dirty one, but rather that the author’s interests lie in the basest human impulses and motivations. He is interested in great failures of idealism, and in pursuing them he delves deep into loneliness and anxiety and drinking and depression. It is heavy stuff, but never dour – his style is flexible, funny and blade-light. You have the impression throughout that here is a writer who can do anything he wants with his words.

Set in the middle of WWII in a small town just outside London, this is a small, dark story about a lonely middle-aged woman who begins an affair with an American lieutenant staying in the same guest house. Everyone else there is single too, but she is the most solitary of all, and as the title suggests her isolation comes to possess and determine her actions more than she might wish.

The War is a constant presence, but not in the ways you might expect – there’s virtually no action, no particular sense of loss or politics or broader context – it is simply represented as a series of minor and significant inconveniences, much as it must have seemed at the time. It’s almost as though the whole things takes place in the belly of a beast which is the War; the characters barely even realise they are there, but occasionally we hear the rumble of its innards in the distance. There’s absolutely nothing of the mythical ‘blitz spirit’ to be found here. But the atmosphere of the guest house and the behaviour of its inhabitants is conveyed with a brilliant ear for dialogue, and a sharp satirical angle presents itself in the form of Mr Thwaites, the resident Daily Mail reader and Little Englander who becomes somewhat sinister in his jolly pomposity.

It’s a very sad book. Enid’s main problem is that she is drawn into situations by feelings she doesn’t understand even while she is terrified of impropriety – so she ends up getting drunk and behaving badly with the Lieutenant, but she inevitably regrets it more than she should, and is constantly troubled by her jealous relationship with another (prettier, younger) woman in the guest house. She doesn’t want to be seen as the prim, proper ‘English Miss’, but the more she thinks about herself in this way, the more she seems condemned to adopt that role forever. She reminded me of myself in ways I wouldn’t normally care to admit.

The book ends on a curious note. It seems inevitable that Enid won’t ever be allowed to get what she wants, and yet the author couldn’t quite bring himself to leave her without any hope. But it just sort of – stops. It’s odd. (less)

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Jan 10, 2011 Doreen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: pleasure-read, favorites

Hamilton does so much well in this novel that it's hard to believe it is not more well-known or that it hasn't been made into a BBC mini-series. In some ways, my other favorite British WWII writer, Olivia Manning, falls into the same category of a sleeper novelist, someone who didn't produced much but should be known for what he/she has written. for one, Hamilton captures the horrors of urban and suburban life in 1940s England. In an attempt to escape the blitz, a very real indisputable horror,...more Hamilton does so much well in this novel that it's hard to believe it is not more well-known or that it hasn't been made into a BBC mini-series. In some ways, my other favorite British WWII writer, Olivia Manning, falls into the same category of a sleeper novelist, someone who didn't produced much but should be known for what he/she has written. for one, Hamilton captures the horrors of urban and suburban life in 1940s England. In an attempt to escape the blitz, a very real indisputable horror, the cast of characters exiled from the city must succumb to the dull humdrum of lower middle class life in a boarding house in Thames Lockdon, a dreary home county town along the river. Psychically defeated already by a war that has gone on forever, resulting in harsh regulations during the black-out, including reduced lighting, limited food rations, limited pub hours (this was when pubs started closing midway through the afternoon until tea time), and even being chastised for going to a restaurant that might be black marketing meat (as Miss Roach is by Mr. Thwaites, a boarding house bully who steamrolls Miss Roach every chance he can), now these Brits are forced to endure each other's neuroses with a stiff upper lip. Interestingly while strict laws in England at the time mandated certain kinds of proper war-time behavior, other social rules seem to have been lessened. For example, the women in this novel have a certain freedom to go to pubs and drink on their own, to go out with American GI's, to have quasi-professional jobs, etc. as represented by Miss Roach who is 39, definitely not youthful but very much single and probably on her way to being a spinster. One can see how Hamilton was a successful dramatist as this novel's plot is hinged on the constant interaction among the boarding house members and attempts to escape it, particularly by Miss Roach. But the only place to escape to is the darkness outside, the river that skirts through the town, and a few public houses. The confining atmosphere is much like Sartre's No Exit where hell becomes other people. Even the American GI Miss Roach hooks up with most likely to escape the hazing by Mr. thwaites and the ennui of the boarding house residents, has such glaring faults that he injects only more anxiety into an already anxiety-ridden situation. But we feel for Miss Roach and we too given the circumstances would rather put up with a loquacious annoying American than be subjected to the coffin-like atmosphere of boarding house life. However, this repressed atmosphere becomes the theatre of war so to speak as personalities clash, sides are taken, and resolutions to these conflicts are deferred until the next meal time. Hamilton has an amazing alacrity of style that while probing the dreariness of these people's lives constantly engages us in the macro dramas that make up their internal and external lives. His sense of narrative timing, his ability to manipulate point of view, and his sentence style all work to entrench the reader, even drench us at times, in the emotional landscape that is war time Britain.

But it's not sentimental in the least; in fact these characters are often held at a telescopic distance so that we see them as oddly endearing creatures with all of their foibles. His masterful use of point of view, moving from limited 3rd person to omniscience seamlessly, allows us both to judge and identity with these characters. Especially so when it comes to Miss Roach, who is a bundle of nerves at times attempting to navigate these treacherous social binds she finds herself, obligated by her own social etiquette and sense of right/wrong behavior but who is trying to also resist these social norms. There is an inertia in all of these characters that is anathema to the pull 'em up by your bootstraps American ideology so that at times one wants to kick them in the butt and say, come on, get a move on. You don't have to just sit and take it. And so it is that when Miss Roach finally does take action, we breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that she does in fact have limits to what she can take and that she has agency, an ability to change her circumstances and not go along passively.

It is at the level of the sentence where much of the emotional range of the characters and the moral outrage that Miss Roach feels take place. Hamilton delicately engineers sentences so that they build toward a denouement while also ranging through an assortment of emotions taking places inside the characters that for the most part cannot be shown to the outside world. Some might think his sentence style overwrought but it captures a certain kind of frenetic quality, an instability entwined with boredom and yearning. So much of the novel takes place insider Miss Roach's head but just when we're not expecting it, an omniscient narrator appears with some sweeping statement that is an interpretation of Miss Roach, wartime England, or stems from the point of view of a minor character. Hamilton takes risks with the narration and in doing so his prose is exciting and evocative, his characters, regardless of whether they fill you with loathing or charitableness, are memorable. (less)

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Jan 16, 2011 Sherrie rated it 2 of 5 stars

If you like feeling TRAPPED in a book with its characters (all of whom - save ONE - are particularly unlikeable), and you also enjoy:

- life during wartime narratives
- English repression of every possible feeling in the giant spectrum of feelings
- just generally feeling terrible

...then this is the book for you!

I guess my main beef with this novel lays mostly on the sad little shoulders of the put-upon Ms. Roach, our protagonist, who spends most of the novel fretting and over-fretting and fretting...more

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Dec 12, 2008 Eileen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: britlit, war, nyrb

If you're interested in social history of Britain in WWII, this is an excellent novel. When I say "social history", though, understand that it is social. This is a book about people and their behavior during a particular wartime, in a particular country. While the awareness of war suffuses the characters and affects their lives profoundly, the story is not about World War II.

That said, I think this is a pretty great book, and not just because I'm interested in the social history. It's one of the...more

3 likes · like · see review

Sep 23, 2012 Ruthiella rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

Have you ever been cornered at an office party by an obnoxious co-worker or at a wedding by a dull guest from whom you were desperate to escape? I have, and usually such experiences remind me of the quote “Hell is other people”. Well, if you know what I am talking about, you will have a deja vu experience when reading The Slaves of Solitude. Which makes it sound like a horrible book and it isn’t. It is actually quite good. Let me try again. Slaves of Solitude is about a lonely, mild, middle age...more

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Dec 29, 2009 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Nick Hornby kind of hits the nail on the head with his blurb, that if you wanted to connect Dickens to Martin Amis with only one author Patrick Hamilton would be your author. This has the great characterizations of Dickens but the nastiness (moral depravity?, neither of these words is quite right, oh well) of M. Amis.

This book is really close to being great, but there is something missing in it. Maybe it needed a little more to the story, maybe the German woman needed to be shown at least once...more

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May 21, 2009 Catherine rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is book was completely unexpected. Who would think that life of 38 year old, spinster Enid Roach would prove so insightful and delightful? Sure, yes, this is set in the fourth year of WWII and things are bad. Really bad and not looking up at all. And Miss Roach is depressed and numbed by it all. But she does rise up again and again and in small and fascinating ways. Hers is a fighting though polite spirit. And that's really the story...Miss Roach fighting her way through the quixotic world...more

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Dec 25, 2009 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: misery-loves-company, nyrb

Of all the books I've attempted to review on this website, none has given me more trouble than Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude. I realize that there are two primary reasons for this critical reticence on my part: (1) The quality control department of my review-writing factory is in shambles. The employees are mutinous, indifferent, and suffering from a midgrade malaise that causes them to spend their days using a bent hanger to fish free stuff out of the vending machine and trying out...more Of all the books I've attempted to review on this website, none has given me more trouble than Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude. I realize that there are two primary reasons for this critical reticence on my part: (1) The quality control department of my review-writing factory is in shambles. The employees are mutinous, indifferent, and suffering from a midgrade malaise that causes them to spend their days using a bent hanger to fish free stuff out of the vending machine and trying out serif fonts for the résumés they plan on submitting to more vote-profitable, stable review-writing empires. (i.e., Ben Harrison, Inc.) This anemic QC department now entirely fails to reign in my autobiographical tangents, self-indulgent ramblings, and dadaist excursions into logical non sequiturs. Before an overseas venture buys me out and shutters me for good, I'd like to apologize for the overall lack of quality of late (relatively speaking, of course -- I've always been idiotically digressive). I've pumped out more shit in last couple months than a man with ebola, I.B.S., and a penchant for White Castle. (2) This particular book is just doggone hard to review because whenever I hear the voices in my head talking about it, describing it, alluding to its many charms, I think, 'Ach! How boring.' In other words, it doesn't really sound like a very good book, although it is. So how do I attempt to manage a P.R. blitz that'll make you wanna haul your keister over to your nearest upholstered device of assisted recumbency and read this fucker? (Incidentally, I didn't know how to spell 'keister' and since I had Wikipedia open, I used that to find the spelling. This delivered me via detour to the entry for 'buttocks' which prominently displayed nude examples of the male and female varieties thereof. Tangentially, I'd like to confess that I wish my buttocks were beautiful enough to be a butt model. It's one of those little dreams you stow away in a heart-shaped locket and don't tell anyone about.)

Okay. Here goes. So The Slaves of Solitude, although it deals with lots of stuff (helpful, eh?), could be classified in that tentative genre of boarding house horror. Not horror in the sense of machete-wielding sociopaths and discordant notes played on a piano followed by *surprise* evisceration. This is psychological horror. For my money, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne kind of closed the book definitely on this genre... until now.

I never ever ever ever ever want to live in a boarding house -- and by logical extension in one of those stupid hippie commune houses where everyone pools their money from their jobs at the incense store and grows vegetables using refortified, sustainable, organic feces and then gets into a fist fight about who gets to eat the last Pop Tart because there's no individual property (and because modern 'hippies' are really, really dumb).

I mean, basically your average English boarding house experience (insofar as I can glean from literature) is just a variant on the Sartre No Exit scenario. A bunch of people forced to eat scones and tea together until they're completely psychologically terrorized by the very existence of each other. Take Mr. Thwaites from this book, for example. He's this old crusty irritating dude who, during WWII, retains some residual German sympathies (at the expense of those commie Russians, of course) and enjoys making all sorts of loud, snide remarks while you're trying to spread your marmalade. Also, he seems to dislike women for the most part (the main character Miss Roach in particular) until this cunty German woman named Vicki Kugelmann moves into the boarding house and puts on her best Marlene Dietrich routine. So Miss Roach -- acting as a surrogate for you and me and as our psychological entryway into this novel -- loathes these two assholes, but is forced to remain all proper, stiff-upper-lipped, and indubitably British at the dinner table while these two flirt up a dust storm. Forget the fact that Vicki is catty and Thwaites is the Plato Form of crackpot curmudgeon... You just want to physically enter the novel, storm into that mouse-quiet dining room, and give those people a good bitch-slap. And if a novel makes you empathize that strongly with a character (Miss Roach) and viscerally despise two other characters so much that you want to come bounding through the Fourth Wall (Is it the Fourth Wall in literature too? Well, it is now.) and serve up a little comeuppance, then it's a success on anyone's scale, right? Luckily for us, (mini-spoiler) Miss Roach does the retaliatory deed for us. To a certain extent. Thank you, Miss Roach, and thank you, Patrick Hamilton.
(less)

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Jan 02, 2012 Tanja rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Yawn. Boring. Didn't like his writing style. Repetitive and just boring. A lot of the main characters annoyed me although I suppose they were meant to be annoying so he did get the point across. The thing is, I suppose he also did a good job exhibiting how boring their lives were so much so that I was bored reading about them. Boring dinners, boring going-down-to-the-pub-and-drinking-a-gin-and-french. I was definitely bored with all the drinking. I think it was just the one character who was mea...more

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Jun 19, 2010 Katy Evans-Bush rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Gorgeous, dyspeptic, uncompromising. Unsentimental.

The book is not without its flaws - chiefly in the author's tendency to let point-of-view reflections slip into lazy, expository characterisation, and some problems with pacing near the end. But the mise en scene is fabulous; the depiction of the main (female) character is masterful; and a very particular grainy quality of life in wartime is foregrounded. Marvellous stuff. Also, all you'll ever need or want to know about life in a boarding house...more

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Nov 30, 2012 Cathy rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this story that takes place in a London boarding house in 1943 during the War. Miss Roach moves to a suburban boarding house to escape the Blitz in London. She commutes to her job at a Publishing House by train. The plot revolves around the boarders and how they interact with each other. There's even a drunk American soldier in the mix who entices Miss Roach as she approaches spinsterhood. Patrick Hamilton was a successful Playwright who had two of his plays made into movies by...more

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Jul 20, 2009 Aaron Haspel rated it 4 of 5 stars

England, 1943, in a boarding-house in a London suburb. No one draws bores and bullies more accurately than Hamilton does. Mr. Thwaites and his Trothing, once read, will never be forgotten.

Hamilton reports conversation so precisely that one is surprised to find him sometimes careless in other details. When Vicki moves into the boarding-house, which is full up, she is supposed to replace Mrs. Barratt, but Vicki moves in, and Mrs. Barratt never leaves. Miss Roach, who is the sort of person to know...more

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Jan 18, 2009 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars

After a Hamilton reading marathon this summer that took in the Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky trilogy and Hangover Square, this is the first I would recommend because it has strong dose of humor to offset his typically grim narrative of characters sliding into an abyss of alcoholism and isolation - his usual bleak naturalism yields here and there to an entertainingly Dickensian overstatement.

Set during WWII, the book also fits on the rather compact shelf of "great English boardinghouse n...more

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Aug 01, 2011 Thomas J. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Patrick Hamilton's best book. He was hailed as a modern Dickens, but never got the attention he deserves, though the comparison is not without truth. He has a similar sense of humor and his characters strike me as being very much the sort that Dickens would have latched onto in the 1930s and '40s.

Much is made of this novel's portrayal of the second world war as experienced in a small English town. But for me the setting is very secondary. The story is really about Enid Roach, a plain almost-midd...more

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Feb 11, 2013 Sian Lile-Pastore rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

have been having a slight second world war binge for work related reasons... and this fitted right in. it's so good and well written in that reserved-how-do-they-do-that-simple-richard-yates type of way. it's set in a boarding house just outside London and the main character is the sweet, single Enid Roach... it's all a little bleak (that'd be the war), and i was pretty worried about how things would pan out for old Roachy. Great atmosphere and sense of place (esp. the boarding house) and quite...more

1 like · like · see review

Apr 03, 2013 Veronica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Veronica by: Kathy

Shelves: fiction, kindle

I'd never read any Patrick Hamilton, but I usually enjoy books set in this era, so I thought I'd give it a try. Hamilton seems a bit misanthropic -- he reminds me of Zoe Heller for his talent in depicting antipathetic characters who remind us of people we have met in real life. But he's funny as well, in a biting sort of way. Life in the boarding house is pretty grim, and you have to feel for poor Miss Roach, despite her own failings.

I love the way he brings the setting to life with his close o...more

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Oct 24, 2012 Trisha rated it 4 of 5 stars

Yet another novel set in WWII Britain, in dismal little town far enough away from London to provide a modicum of security to the protagonist, a middle-aged, insecure spinster who spends the war complaining about how inconvenient it is and fretting about how awful her life is, living in a boarding house where she allows herself to be bullied by a pretentious old man and taken advantage of by a woman she once thought of as a friend. It’s not often I end up liking a book that’s filled with so many...more

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Jun 26, 2012 Lorenzo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: british, aaa-my-library, 2012-readings

It seems like I became pretty hopeless in writing my book reviews in the last days. It could be this persistent headache I feel from early morning till late evening. It could be boredom. It could be me.

The problem is that now I know that I will not be able to do this novel any justice. And that's a pity, as no one like Patrick Hamilton would deserve to get a good review.

Time could be such an unforgiving beast. And what time does to magnificent but ill-preserved books, yellowing their pages, pil...more

4 likes · like · see review

May 30, 2013 Donna rated it 5 of 5 stars

The only thing a boarding house can't tell you about human nature is what it's like to have a helluva lot of money. But it can tell you everything else, and will, whether you want to know or not. Patrick Hamilton has such an excellent boarding house reach, the Rosamund Tea Rooms even tell us a thing or two about the war. There's one going on between Mr. Thwaites, an old bully who has it in for the spinster of the species, and Miss Roach, who just might be one. From there on it's pure boarding ho...more

5 likes · like · see review

Apr 02, 2013 J. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: this-england, second-world-war, hamilton, boarding-house, they-also-serve

Unassumingly drab portrait of England under the blitz begins on a harsh note, with a sweepingly Dickensian view of the horizon ....

"London, the crouching monster, like every other monster, has to breathe, and breathe it does, in its own obscure, malignant way."

Then by turns, we're dragged forward, into a kind of silent-film montage, something from a Fritz Lang nightmare:

"Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infin...more

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Nov 23, 2011 Ralph rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a book about war that takes place in England during World War II. But its not about WWII, but about a different kind of war - one that was merely exacerbated by the physical hostilities, but not caused by, or directly tied to them. This is a book about the social wars fought in all social gatherings, and the resultant solitude. The guns of the tongue, and the shrapnel of the glance. The wounds of innuendo and the arrows of the unsaid.
The main character, Miss Roach, is a nervous, frighte...more

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Apr 30, 2013 Jane added it · review of another edition

Had Charles Dickens travelled forward in time, had Muriel Spark travelled back, had they met in wartime London, they might have collaborated on this book.

“London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs...more

7 likes · like · see review

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About Patrick Hamilton

He was born Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to writer parents. Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School.

After a brief...more He was born Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to writer parents. Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School.

After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as Rope's End in America).

The Midnight Bell (1929) is based upon Hamilton's falling in love with a prostitute, and was later published along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) as the semi-autobiographical trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky (1935).

Hamilton disliked many aspects of modern life. He was disfigured badly when he was run over by a car in the late 1920s: the end of his novel Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), with its vision of England smothered in metal beetles, reflects his loathing of the motor car. However, despite some distaste for the culture in which he operated, he was a popular contributor to it. His two most successful plays, Rope and Gas Light (1938, known as Angel Street in the USA), made Hamilton wealthy and were also successful as films: the British-made Gaslight (1940) and the 1944 American remake, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).

Hangover Square (1941) is often judged his most accomplished work and still sells well in paperback, and is regarded by contemporary authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as an important part of the tradition of London novels. Set in Earls Court where Hamilton himself lived, it deals with both alcohol-drinking practices of the time and the underlying political context, such as the rise of fascism and responses to it. Hamilton became an avowed Marxist, though not a publicly declared member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. During the 1930's, like many other authors, Hamilton grew increasingly angry with capitalism and, again like others, felt that the violence and fascism of Europe during the period indicated that capitalism was reaching its end: this encouraged his Marxism and his novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) was a satirical attack of capitalist culture.

During his later life, Hamilton developed in his writing a misanthropic authorial voice which became more disillusioned, cynical and bleak as time passed. The Slaves of Solitude (1947), was his only work to deal directly with the Second World War, and he preferred to look back to the pre-war years. His Gorse Trilogy - three novels about a devious sexual predator and conman - are not generally well thought of critically, although Graham Greene said that the first was 'the best book written about Brighton' and the second (Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse) is regarded increasingly as a comic masterpiece. The hostility and negativity of the novels is also attributed to Hamilton's disenchantment with the utopianism of Marxism and depression. The trilogy comprises The West Pier (1952); Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), dramatized as The Charmer in 1987; and in 1955 Hamilton's last published work, Unknown Assailant, a short novel much of which was dictated while Hamilton was drunk. The Gorse Trilogy was first published in a single volume in 1992.

Hamilton had begun to consume alcohol excessively while still a relatively young man. After a declining career and melancholia, he died in 1962 of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure, in Sheringham, Norfolk. He was married twice, firstly to Lois Marie Martin in 1930, and a year after divorcing Lois, to Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot in 1954.

--Wikipedia January 9, 2010(less)

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“The meal was breakfast: the subject, utility clothing. 'As for the stuff they're turning out for men nowadays,' said Mr Thwaites bitterly, 'I wouldn't give it to my Valet.'

Mr Thwaites' valet was quite an old friend. An unearthly, flitting presence, whose shape, character, age, and appearance could only be dimly conceived, he had been turning up every now and again ever since Miss Roach had known Mr Thwaites. Mostly he was summoned into being as one from whom all second-rate, shoddy, or inferior articles were withheld. But sometimes things were good enough for Mr Thwaites' valet, but would not do for Mr Thwaites. ” — 1 person liked it

“He had further narrowed his mind by a considerable amount of travel abroad, where he had again always made his way to the small hotels.” — 1 person liked it

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