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The Slaves of Solitude | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick Hamilton
Publisher: Constable
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £3.72
You Save: £4.27 (53%)
New (17) Used (2) from £3.72
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 4769
Media: Paperback
Pages: 327
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 1845294157
EAN: 9781845294151
ASIN: 1845294157
Publication Date: August 24, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 2 - 3 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, UK *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
Redemption on the Home Front September 1, 2008
Melmoth (London, England)
Very few writers ever managed to evoke the seedy, dreary atmosphere that gripped Britain in the years in and around World War II as well as Patrick Hamilton. He understood the strange oppression both of the threat of war and of the tight-laced mentality that was the reaction to the excesses of the Twenties. Much of his writing dwells in "genteel" boarding houses and overcrowded pubs. He surrounds his characters with doilies and faded chintz, with horse-brasses and fake Tudor beams. The characters themselves are often studies in isolation, pent-up creatures trapped as much by their own thoughts as the petty, middle-class social mores of the time.
The inhabitants of the Rosamund Tea Rooms in Thames Lockdon - a collection of ageing ladies and elderly men together with the flotsam and jetsam of "nice" men and women thrust out of London by the fear of a renewed Blitz - are some of Hamilton's finest and loneliest creations. The elderly spend their days haunting the library, the cemetery, the park. The young spend their days journeying to and from a London that can offer them only "no cigarettes" and "no nylons".
Life becomes miniaturised. The great battle for plain, thirty-nine-year-old, ex-schoolmistress Miss Roach is not the war but her daily encounter with the awful Mr Thwaite - a stunning portrait of a Daily Mail reader - who "like the Wise Old Owl he keeps his counsel", "hays his doubts - as the Scotchman said ... of yore" and altogether disapproves of "our Russian friends" rather more than he does of "friend Hitler".
This snowglobe of a world finds itself shaken up and whirled about by the arrival of two new figures. First, the charming, gauche, Lieutenant Pike - an American soldier who seems alternately smitten by and utterly careless of Miss Roach. Secondly, there is Vicki Kugelmann, the German woman whom Miss Roach befriends. Neither of these people turns out to be quite exactly what they seem and both succeed in permanently disturbing the atmosphere of the Rosamund Tea Rooms.
The Slaves of Solitude is a brilliant study of isolation and the mental processes it produces in its sufferers. That it also manages a gently triumphant and redemptive conclusion makes it all the more remarkable.
Superb wartime classic April 14, 2006
reader (UK)
38 out of 38 found this review helpful
Bombed out of her London flat, Miss Roach, thirty-nine and alone, takes up residence at the Rosamund Tea Rooms at Thames Lockdon. Here we encounter an array of lost, rootless, lonely people, the flotsam and jetsam of the War - the slaves of solitude.
The story unfolds through the eyes of the shy, self-effacing Miss Roach, a woman whose natural decency stands in stark contrast to the casual cruelty of the people around her; her fragile sense of self-worth, constantly undermined by her back-stabbing friend, the odious Vicki Kugelmann, the drunken ineptitude of her American lover, Lieutenant Pike, but most of all, her humiliation at the hands of one of Hamilton's most grotesque fictional monsters, the repellent Mr Thwaites - bully, narcissist, and Fascist sympathiser.
Despite the apparent tragedy of Miss Roach's situation, the pathos is relieved by Hamilton's unique black humour and his ability to write perfect, utterly convincing dialogue, infused with waspish comedy. Ever-present is the War itself, robbing the characters of their little comforts, dictating their everyday lives. An underrated, enjoyable, entertaining read. Great to see this wartime classic back in print again!
Essential for admirers of Patrick Hamilton March 3, 2006
Kenelm M. Averill (Sheffield, UK)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Any admirer of Hangover Square or the London trilogy should seek out and read this now out of print 1948 masterpiece, dealing with life in a small town boarding house during World War II. Beware: inside you will find some of the most passionately realised scenes of intensity in the whole of English literature. In places the fiery tension between the heroic Miss Roach and her two fellow lodgers and opponents, Vicki and the deranged, bullying Thwaites, burns its way across the pages. Patrick Hamilton also wrote plays, and this novel has an explosive dramatic force you are unlikely to find anywhere outside the very best pages of Dostoevsky. Written in an unfashionably warm and fulsome style, the novel has at heart a moral statement to make. It seems to say, the evils of nationalism and prejudice are not the stuff of newspapers or history books. The seedbed of fascism lies in everyday bullying and causal cruelty, and its antidote too lies in the courage of ordinary humanity. Note to Penguin: you really should reissue this one again...
Intelligent, witty, above all, humane November 14, 2000
Chandler (London)
20 out of 20 found this review helpful
Along with Hangover Square and One Thousand Streets Under the Sky, this is a tremendous novel. Hamilton writes beautifully about a cast of dreadfuls- the parochial bores, the bitchy backstabbing friends, and above all the boozers. It is rare to read a book set in the 1940s which still seems so contemporary. The humour is biting and the depths and subtletys of character equal to Greene, Waugh and their ilk. Hamilton's writing brings to mind the Martin Amis school of tales from the London gutter, but his characters are achingly alive and never seem cartoonish. Read all three...
A long overdue reprint of one of Hamilton's best August 16, 1999
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
Congratulations to Michael Holroyd for using his influence to secure the re-issue of The Slaves of Solitude (and Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky). Hamilton's wartime England, viewed this time, not through the bottom of a glass, but through the eyes of a brave and decent woman who has been bullied all her life, is in my opinion his most moving work. A triumph from a writer who was himself sliding desparately downhill.
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