The Slaves of Solitude

by Patrick Hamilton

Other authorsMichael Holroyd (Introduction)

Paperback, 1999

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Books Ltd (1999), Paperback, 240 pages

Description

"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 rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon from which she commutes to a publishing job in London. She lives in a boardinghouse run by Miss Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the gaseous speechifying and weird dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and relieves her solitude by drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelman, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That's when Miss Roach's troubles really begin. Recounting an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boardinghouse, Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude, with its delightfully improbable heroine, is one of the finest and funniest books ever written about the trials of a lonely heart."--Book cover.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member cerievans1

ecommended by others on LT. In 1943, in a sleepy market town by the Thames, are numerous boarding houses, long stay hotels where the dispossessed, abandoned or bombed out members of society find a room, some food and some warmth. Miss Roach, 38, a secretary at a London publishing house, finds

herself at one such boarding house, the Rosamund Tea Rooms, having been bombed out of London. She muddles along with life, her daily commute into London, the routine of mealtimes at the boarding house, the bizarre targeted comments of her fellow boarded, Mr Thwaites. Her routine livens up when Miss Roach meets an American lieutenant who takes her to the pub and gets her drunk, and kisses her on a park bench in the moonlight. When Miss Roach's friend, Vicky moves into the boarding house, things take a turn for the worse as quiet Vicky is revealed to be a cruel and selfish person. I really enjoyed this novel, its depiction of skewed wartime life and the results when people are thrown together is fascinating. 5 stars - one of my favourite reads of the year.

Show Less

10 more

LibraryThing member dmarsh451

The only thing a boarding house can't tell you 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 house.
The centre of the other war is going on elsewhere. London. Berlin. I liked the way Hamilton had it sneaking around the edges of the bigger war going on in the boarding house. It is elsewhere stealing light at night, and sugar, and the wider world.
There is a wonderful scene where Miss Roach, out with the American Lieutenant (he has a habit of asking women to marry him over whisky) in a carload of drinkers, imagines other cars all over England full of people getting tight and rumbling around to forget what is impossible to forget except in cars full of drunk people. Miss Roach often expresses this awareness she has of living a different, temporary life. And that reminded me how we all get fooled into thinking that we're living some kind of anomalous, temporary life when the whole time this is the one. It really is the one.
Bravo Patrick Hamilton.

Show Less

LibraryThing member GarySeverance

Patrick Hamilton's work is gaining attention as a result of a 2007 publication of The Slaves of Solitude by The New York Review of Books. Originally published in 1947, it tells the story of residents in a boarding house in a small village located on a train line to London. Although they share the

same dining room and lounge, the characters live their lives in solitude, limited by the conditions imposed on civilians by 1943 World War II. The distinguishing factor is the insight of the players that ranges from minimal to obsessive. This is a very engaging novel that immerses the reader in the era, location, and interaction of the characters. Readers are confronted by their own solitude and learn that insight is the result of sharing experiences with others. Hamilton's novel shows that war prevents isolation but encourages people to explore their solitude.

Show Less

LibraryThing member CatrionaOlding3

Hamilton tackling a subject unfamiliar to us now...the mid 20th century necessity of boarding house living. A study of bullying, trechery and triumph. Great writing.

LibraryThing member starbox

A fabulous read, in which the older reader leading an essentially pointless life sees much to identify with!
It's halfway through WW2, and in a small town near London live a group of older folk in genteel poverty, every trifling event noteworthy. The only one working is 39 year old spnster, Enid

Roach; she forces herself to meals, presided over by bullying and rather stupid Mr Thwaites; she starts a rather tentative 'romance' with a hard drinking American lieutenant. And she goes out to tea with a nice German girl friend....
But the humdrum life is to become filled with violent passions, even though nothing really huge occurs.
"In this still, grey winter-gripped dining room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!"

Absolutely fabulous writing, conjuring up a time and a place. I loved how the author evokes Miss Roach re-playing conversations in her head (IS she imagining the slights, or are the others truly horrible to her?)
"Miss Roach had now reached the point (she saw) at which she was inventing conversations with Vicki, inventing Vicki's answers, and then getting white with anger at these invented answers." Haven't we all been there?

Show Less

LibraryThing member jonfaith

One could trouble oneself with establishing Hamilton's protagonist Enid Roach in a tradition stretching from Jane Eyre to Bridget Jones, but, then, that isn't really the argument. The inhabitants of the boarding-house were all developed in that sitting room profile manner. Their coexistence stems

from the Blitz, the privation, the War. That is the spectral presence which haunts this novel.

Show Less

LibraryThing member brenzi

I've had this book on my shelf for eons but it wasn't until earlier this year when I read Laura Talbot's The Gentlewoman, that I felt the urge to pick it up. In the Introduction (which I always read AFTER I read the book: lesson learned) I learned that Talbot and Hamilton were married for a few

tumultuous years but he was a raging alcoholic and it didn't work out even though she allowed him to live with her when they were both nearing the ends of their lives. At any rate, I enjoyed this tale of a spinster living in the London countryside after escaping the Blitz in the early years of WWII.

Miss Roach now resides in a boarding house, the Rosamund Tea Rooms in its former life, with other solitary souls. As the story opens, it is 1943 and Hamilton concentrates his story on the interactions among the boarding house residents but hones in on Miss Roach and the totally obnoxious Mr. Thwaites. His know it all attitude is insufferable and he decides Miss Roach is an easy target. Discussion of the war prevails and the town is filled with military men and soon Miss Roach takes up with an American lieutenant. Things seem to go along along smoothly although the lieutenant is a very heavy drinker, much like the author, until Miss Roach's German friend, Vicki Kugelmann, takes up residence and things go all amok.

The theme seems to be the the inconsequence of these solitary souls but it is also an indictment of life in Britain during the war: the shortages (of just about everything) and its impact on the populace. So well written and with brilliant humorous touches and an unlikely heroine, I highly recommend this book.

Show Less

LibraryThing member michaelbartley

I liked this book a lot, it is set in a town near London during ww2, the main character, a middle age woman is living in a boarding house. her apartment in london had been destroyed by a bomb. it is a sad story, while there is a war in the background there is a war in the boarding house. she had to

deal with a bully and a friend that turns out not to be a friend.

Show Less

LibraryThing member dmenon90

At long last, despite the dreary brain-fog I have been muddling through since November, a novel delights me.
Its setting, funnily enough, is anything but delightful: 1943 England- 'the worst part of the worst war in the world'- not London but a quiet suburb named Thames Lockdon. Here we get to know

one Miss Roach, 39, who's moved to the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a boarding house where nothing ever happens. (She's been bombed out of her London flat.) Commuting daily to the city to work in a publishing house, Miss Roach is muddling along in that drear period of history, blackouts and all, when she runs into an American army man and things liven up a bit.

As if to prove that she will be denied even this (questionable) pleasure- the Lieutenant is unreliable and a drinker- 'things' then immediately begin to go sideways. Miss Roach's friend Vicki Kugelmann, who is of all things, a German, decides to move in to the Rosamund herself. That's not all. She also has her rather pettily evil sights on the Lieutenant himself. And that's not all, either. No; incredibly, she also has her sights on a certain other member of the boarding house, a Mr. Thwaites, who happens to be the presiding bully of the establishment.

And it is this character that is the showpiece of the novel in some ways. The skill of author Patrick Hamilton in sketching this mean-spirited, pompous, bitter gasbag is so great that we cringe at his every appearance. Smart at every slight he aims at our unfortunate (but not soft) Miss Roach; we want to look away when Vicki with her incredible slyness starts aiming her arrows at the old fool himself. Mind, Vicki has the other agenda of the Lieutenant too. The said Lieutenant Pike, a bit of a shiftless twit of the kind who can't help being rather dog-like in simple, stupid goofiness, remains inscrutable in his motives throughout, much like Vicki herself. And so is Miss Roach left to wade through pettiness, affection, annoyance, rage, and so much more while struggling to maintain the peace. Don't forget: Thwaites, she and Vicki all live together in the boarding house, and such close quarters would be even more unbearable if there were no peace.

The other boarders too, like Miss Roach, are slaves of solitude. What is it about middle-aged singletons living in boarding-houses that is so poignant? (Ha. And look at us in our luxurious peacetime dwellings, moaning about having to wear masks to protect us from a potentially fatal virus!)The events in the novel lead up to a tense confrontation, a poignant death, and an unexpectedly soul-lifting encounter between Miss Roach and Mr. Prest, a seemingly under-the-radar member of the boarding house.

Why I took so long to find this author I will never know but now that he is found I will sink my claws in; to my delight, the old dear has written several more! And so he is another worthy addition to the pantheon of older Brit writers who never fail to satisfy: Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, J.G. Farrell, and the like.

Show Less

LibraryThing member burritapal

A thorough study of a few characters living in a boarding house on the suburbs of London during the Blitz. Thoroughly engrossing.

LibraryThing member jennifergeran

"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 the 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." This paragraph stayed with me for so many days (mornings) that I had to go back through, hunt it down (around page 68), and admire it again: if only for the punctuation.

Show Less

Fewer