The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

The Bell-Boy was James Hamilton-Paterson's third novel, first published in 1990. 'Somewhere on my tropical travels I encountered a rickety hotel on whose roof an ancient servant lived in a converted hen coop. This gave me the idea for a young bell-boy, Laki, who is up from the provinces and lives on top of his hotel in the holy city of Malomba. He moonlights as a shrewd guide for foreign visitors, his latest clients being a hippie English family who are in Malomba for psychic surgery. Their mutual exploitation leads to both farce and minor tragedy.' James Hamilton-Paterson 'A brilliant religious satire with elements of E.F. Benson and Evelyn Waugh... Few books since E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (whose formal perfection this novel shares) have conveyed more intensely the allure (and the revulsion) the East holds for Westerners.' New York Times

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

James Hamilton-Paterson is a British poet, novelist, and one of the most private literary figures of his generation. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he began his career as a journalist before emerging as a novelist with a distinctive lyrical style. He gained early recognition for Gerontius, a Whitbread Award-winning novel, and went on to write Ghosts of Manila and America’s Boy, incisive works reflecting his deep engagement with the Philippines. His interests range widely, from history and science to aviation, as seen in Seven-Tenths and Empire of the Clouds. He also received praise for his darkly comic Gerald Samper trilogy. Hamilton-Paterson divides his time between Austria, Italy, and the Philippines and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.