The Slaves of Solitude (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – February 20, 2007

One of the most atypical of Patrick Hamilton's novels (and perhaps the most beloved of them), THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE takes place in a suburban boarding house in 1943 where the heroine Miss Roach--intelligent, lonely, and on the cusp of middle age--has moved to escape the dangers of the Blitz. Commuting from the publishing house where she reads manucsripts in London, she spends her nights wandering the deserted unlighted streets, necking in parks with American soldiers, and being bullied at dinner by the sly and pompous autocrat of the dining room, Mr. Thwaites, another lodger at the Rosamund Tearoom where most of the action is set. This beautifully constructed little novel perfectly captures the mood of its time. It also anticipates the fascination with the alienation common among shabby-genteel boarding houses and pension-hotels that emblematizes the dilapidated middle-class culture of the UK in the twenty-five years after the war (as in Terrence Rattigan's SEPARATE TABLES or Elizabeth Taylor's MRS. PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT). The novel is in many ways exploring the nature of war itself on a figurative level, but it also first and foremost a comedy. Miss Roach's boarding-house nemeses, the sinister and German-born Vicki Kugelmann and the splenetic Mr. Thwaites, are so memorably awful and unpleasant they win the reader's heart immediately; Mr. Thwaites, in particular, is so beautifully drawn as to equal the best comic secondary creations of Dickens or Austen. The novel touches upon all kinds of tricky ideas about paranoia and consciousness that a clever reader might be interested in teasing out further, but simply as a comedy of manners this novel is a pure tonic.

The Slaves of Solitude is a small, sad story that manages to be quite funny. Our protagonist, Miss Roach, lives at a boardinghouse in a small riverside town south of London during the dark days of WWII. Her life is dull and predictable, and at age 39 she has mostly given up on the idea that this situation can be remedied. Every day she commutes to her job in the city, and every evening she returns to the boardinghouse to be emotionally tortured by one of the other residents, the pompous blowhard, Mr. Thwaits. Thwaits is a ridiculous character, a bully and pedant, who periodically descends into “Thwaitsian Trothing”, that is to say speaking in ludicrous faux old-timey language, thus torturing Miss Roach not only with his jibes, but also with the very way in which he utters them. Things begin to change though with the introduction of two new characters: a brash American soldier, and shitty drunkard, Lieutenant Pike; and a supposed friend of German extraction, Vicki Kugelman. With their introduction begins an epic battle of wills, in which Vicki, enlisting the aid of Thwaits and the Lieutenant, continually and maliciously crosses the line, yet somehow always manages to turn the tables on Miss Roach. And here Hamilton gives us a deep exploration of loneliness, not only that of Miss Roach, but that of all the cast. The reader will rightfully despise Thwaits, Vicki, and the Lieutenant, but by the end of the book they will also understand these characters, whose actions are driven by the same taskmaster that dominates Miss Roach’s life; Solitude.

The e-edition of this book needs a lot of editing--words run together, garbled, etc. If you push on through that, the reward is nice prose, a clue about manners of the time, and a plot that centers around the rising tensions between two single ladies approaching middle age, one of English descent and the other of German. The two live in a boarding house outside of London during the early years of WWII, and both receive attention from a loutish American lieutenant. The more decent one (your guess) prevails in the feud (if not in love) after receiving an inheritance from her last known relation. The story ends with her spending a grand day as a guest at one of London's finest resort hotels. I probably am not in the target demographic, but a NYTimes writer recommended it.

Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude is set in 1943 and was written in 1947. In it the Second World War is almost a character in itself, driving people from their homes, throwing the country into oppressive darkness and acting as a sort of 'petty pilferer' of everything from butter and sugar to cigarettes and nail polish. Even the very dawn, Hamilton tells us, 'bore no more resemblance to a peace-time dawn than the aspect of nature on a Sunday bears a resemblance to a Sunday bears a resemblance to the aspect of nature on a weekday ... the dawn itself had been grimly harnessed to the war effort, made to alter its normal mode of existence, had been Bevin-conscripted.'Indeed, the very premise of the book is reliant on the circumstances of war-time. Miss Roach (only three-quarters through the story do we learn that her first name is Enid) is a single woman in her late 30s and has been bombed out of her London home. Like many others, she has left the city to escape the Blitz and now boards at a slightly shabby guest house in Thames Lockdon, a small, claustrophobic riverside town 25 miles away, and commutes to London every day to her job as a general administrator and occasional manuscript reader at a publishing house. The boarding house itself, still known as the Rosamund Tea Room despite having stopped functioning as such years previously, is a stiflingly tedious environment in which all the residents live a life of unvarying routine punctuated by mediocre rationed meals and awkward, hushed conversation. Two things, however, dangerously disrupt the Rosamund Tea Room's equilibrium and Miss Roach's own life: the arrival of an American soldier who takes a shine to her, and a new guest in the form of Vicki Kugelmann, a German woman who has lived in England for the past 15 years and with whom Miss Roach has previously befriended out of sympathy.And yet, despite it being so solidly rooted in the war, there's so much about this story that also feels strikingly current. Mr Thwaites, the Rosamund Tea Room's most universally loathed resident, for example, is a type you'll almost certainly recognise. Thwaites is a tiresome bully who is desperate to goad Miss Roach into political arguments in which she has no interest in participating, is fully convinced that anyone who disagrees with him is a Communist, and reads no newspaper other than the Daily Mail. He has 'further narrowed his mind by a considerable amount of travel abroad' and gleefully enjoys the horrors of war, listening to the news 'in the test match spirit'. If you've met a loud, blazer-wearing, retired middle-class UKIP-supporting pub bore whose attempts at being jovial always involve a deeply unfunny lapse into weird faux-historical language ('A fine morning, in Troth! And dost though go forth this bonny morn, into the highways and byways?') or vaguely offensive comedy accents ('I hay ma doots, as the Scotchman said ... of yore') you've essentially met Mr Thwaites. And like Miss Roach, you've probably gritted your teeth and nodded politely when you wanted to punch him in the face. Mr Thwaites is one of those types who secretly admires German fascism, but also hates individual Germans - 'for although Mr Thwaites in his heart profoundly respected the German people for their political wisdom, he was not the sort of man who could refrain from participation in any sort of popular chase when one appeared on his doorstep'.The Slaves of Solitude is a comedy as dark as the blackout, and I'm convinced it could only ever have been written in England, depending so heavily as it does on a) the repression of every emotion under the sun in a despite bid to avoid the horrors of 'making a scene' and b) everyone drinking unwisely on an almost daily basis in order to compensate for this. Alcohol is as constant a presence in this novel as it is in Hamilton's Hangover Square, and it's only with a couple of drinks in them that any of the characters seem even halfway capable of enjoying themselves - and even then, it's a pretty hollow sort of enjoyment in which Miss Roach, probably correctly, suspects they'd never have indulged in peace-time. Miss Roach's largely unvoiced loathing of Mr Thwaites and her silent resentment of Vicki Kugelmann - a woman for whom the word 'frenemy' might have been invented - are entirely credible, however frustrating they might be (you will want to shout 'Just bloody TELL them' at least once per chapter).I know The Slaves of Solitude will absolutely not be to everyone's taste, but I loved it more than anything I've read in a very long time. It's evocative, perceptive and brilliantly written, full of perfectly chosen details - Patrick Hamilton has an eye like no other for mundane minutiae that acquire significance in the claustrophobic world of boarding houses, commuter trains, pubs and park benches. It's often bleak, certainly, but it's also very funny, a true tragicomedy in which events unfold gloriously small scale, but which also seems to say something so much bigger. It's impossible not to root for Miss Roach, whose silent observations of her fellow boarding house residents are pin-sharp and whose own self-analysis is also so considered and astute. While it's very much a book about boredom, petty social prejudices and low-level rivalries, it also celebrates the tiniest of victories in a way that I couldn't help but find slightly heartwarming, and while the ending is certainly a long way from being happy-ever-after, it feels satisfyingly appropriate.

Wonderful character studies of many different people. Written from a woman's point of view in a very authentic manner. Not a book to put your mind at rest, the last paragraph carries an implied threat to the main character and the reader's future fate.

NHKブックレヴューで翻訳本が紹介され、何とも孤独な本だというので、読んでみた。なかなか面白い。３９歳独身の主人公ミス・ローチとは何者なのか？用心深い独身女性？独りよがりな自己憐憫者？不器用な善人？実は自立した生活者？語り手の微妙な距離感が、読者の判断を迷わせる。　第二次大戦下のロンドンでミス・ローチの目下の問題は、戦争ではない。もちろん彼女がこの下宿屋に滞在しているのは、ロンドンの空襲を避けてのことだ。しかし彼女は戦争を意識的に無視する。出版社勤務のミス・ローチは意識的な人間なのだ。絶えずあれこれ煩悶し、挙句に気にし過ぎる自分を戒め、お堅いハイミスとみられている。しかし真面目で堅物のミス・ローチも、心の奥には弱さと強さそしてかすかな悪意が隠し持つ。作者は、時につき離し、時に寄り添いミス・ローチの心の内をさらけ出す。　それにしても彼女は「孤独の奴隷」なのか？そうだとして、それは彼女の人格のせい？威張った老人の嫌味のはけ口になるのは、彼女のせい？友人のはずのドイツ人女性に裏切られるのは、彼女のせい？酒飲みのアメリカ中尉を受け入れられないのは、彼女のせい？ちっぽけな見栄をはり、人並みに恨みを抱き、小さな意趣返しでささやかな喜びを感じる。そんな彼女の性格が彼女を「孤独の奴隷」にするというなら、それは理不尽だ。　そうではないだろう。孤独なのは彼女だけではない。登場人物の全員が孤独だ。つまり人間はみんな「孤独の奴隷」だということ。本書の最後は、「神がわれらを救わん」との祈りの言葉である。ミス・ローチの祈りなのか、作者の祈りなのか。しかし嬉しいことにミス・ローチは自分の孤独を嘆かない。あれこれ今日の出来事に思い巡らしても、二つ並んだベッドの一方が空っぽでも、明日のために早く眠りにつこうと意志する健気な女性でもあるのだ。

Started off ok but long descriptions of essentially boring people living boring lives and being unkind to each other.

Hangover Square was a knock-out of a novel. Slaves of Solitude is pretty good but I would not say great. I would not call this a "masterpiece" as some have done.The characters are unique as is the situation they find themselves in. The dilemma is interesting and engages the reader quicky.Bothersome for me is the way the author, Patrick Hamilton, belabours his analysis of these people, how they act and react: does he not trust his readers to be intelligent? Or does he feel misunderstood generally?It is, however, an easy read and a redemptive ending.