Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square was published in 1941.

Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) was an English novelist and playwright. He enjoyed some success before self-destructing with alcohol.

Hangover Square is his most famous novel. It was adapted to film in 1945.

While Hamilton clearly had literary aspirations Hangover Square is also a crime novel, falling into the psychological crime novel sub-genre. I have to be honest and say that this is not one of my favourite sub-genres.

Critics get very excited by the idea that this is some kind of political novel offering social commentary and an examination of a society on the brink of war. This is mostly poppycock. The novel is focused entirely and obsessively on the inner workings of its protagonist. The approach of war is there in the background but really plays no significant part in the novel. Maybe Hamilton thought he was saying something important about English society in the late 30s but what he has to say is fairly trite.

In the 1940s there was a huge craze for dubious pop psychology and half-baked Freudianism, all rather laughable but they did provide the raw material for some insanely enjoyable movies.

At the time people thought of schizophrenia and “split personality” as being the same thing. Split personality later became known as dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder. This is where a person has two or more distinct personalities. That’s assuming that this disorder actually exists, which is doubtful to say the least. I suspect that Hamilton read a magazine article about it and thought it would be a cool subject for a novel. In the novel it just doesn’t come across as being truly convincing.

Added to which, the protagonist’s main problem is that he spends his entire life in an alcohol haze which is why he falls for a woman who is clearly going to make his life a misery. Perhaps the author would have been better off focusing either on the split personality thing or the protagonist’s alcohol-induced errors of judgment.

George Harvey Bone is a lonely 34-year-old alcoholic loser. He also has some kind of mental disorder which causes him to switch back and forth between two different personalities. He thinks of these as his ordinary moods and his dead moods. When he switches personalities he has no memory of anything the other personality has done. Both personalties are however sad alcoholic losers.

And in both personality modes George is in love with a gorgeous floozy named Netta. In his dead moods he plans to kill her.

His whole relationship with Netta is a disaster right fro the start and in fact there is no actual relationship. Netta is using him at various times when it suits her convenience. Due to a combination of booze, his naïveté in regard to women, his social ineptitude and his desperation he cannot figure out that he should run way from Netta as fast as he can. Instead he keeps crawling back to get kicked again.

George is so hopeless and lacking in self-respect that it’s hard to feel any sympathy for him. The story plays out as black comedy rather than tragedy. That was presumably the author’s intention but it’s so cruel that it’s unpleasant reading.

I can see why this would be the kind of book that literary critics would go for. I found it to be a bit of a mess and a bit of a slog to get through. Your mileage may vary.