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!
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.
Do You like book The Slaves Of Solitude (2007)?
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 again about everything that happens to her. WWII has dropped her into a gray & terrible little town in a dingy boarding house and it doesn't seem to bring the best out in anyone. (This seems to be Hamilton's main point - war is shite & no good can come of it.) Ms. Roach is in turn tortured by an evil crusty old boarder named Mr. Thwaites (his main weapon is cruel passive-aggressiveness), and a man-stealing German woman who she mistakingly befriends, Vicki Kugelman. Ms. Roach and the German battle over a drunk American soldier who is the living embodiment of 'callous' and then like clockwork, Thwaites becomes grossly infatuated with Kugelman. And then those two drive Ms. Roach batty for page after page after page until you just want to grab her by the shoulders and shout JESUS CHRIST WHY WON'T YOU STAND UP FOR YOURSELFIn this age of modern femininity you just wish she'd punch Vicki Kugleman right in her German face. Oh well.
—Sherrie
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 in 1943, where he brashly courts Miss Roach with disarming, good-natured ham-handed vigor. The principle arena of the book is the boarding house where Roach and her fellow boarders are nightly subjected to the spectacular boorishness of Mr. Thwaites, a devastating literary creation that had me wincing and gasping as I might over the jaw-dropping sallies of Borat, or of Ricky Gervaise in the original British version of ‘The Office.’ A thoroughgoing comic monster worthy of Dickens, he is joined by the German immigrant Vickie Kugelmann in waging an insidious war of words and slights upon poor Miss Roach. Hamilton writes like a dream, with a rare psychological insight and an intense relish for tying flesh and blood characters into knots of their own devising. His dialogue is word perfect and brilliantly, fully realized – at one point I dissolved into gales over a perfectly placed line that simply read “Oh…… Oh!…… Oh!” There may be parallels and echoes of the global situation to be teased out of the work, and Hamilton beautifully conveys the deprivations of beleaguered Britain growing shabbier and more threadbare by the day, but the book’s real genius lies in moments of defeat, discovery and triumph which spring to vivid life after sixty years of obscurity. This is a true classic, a great introduction to Hamilton, and a delicious read for anyone who enjoys a comedy of manners. A sheer joy, and now one of my new all time favorites.
—David
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! He creates a really novel comic bad character worthy of Thackeray.Why can't people write more like this now?
—Katy Evans-Bush
