I was going to say that my miserabilist streak continues, book-wise. But this isn’t quite true. “One of the funniest novels I have ever read,” proclaims Sarah Waters on the cover of the new Abacus edition of The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, published to mark its 70th birthday – and to my surprise, this is a statement with which I can’t disagree. Of course, this is Hamilton we’re talking about: the story is often bleak beyond words. But it’s also blackly comic, thanks largely to the character of Mr Thwaites, the reigning deity of the boarding house where the action mostly takes place.
Having been “bombed out” of London, Miss Roach, an unmarried woman in her late 30s, has retreated with her few possessions to the town of Thames Lockdon (AKA Henley-on-Thames). There, she has found bed and board at the Rosamund Tea Rooms. No one knows who Rosamund is, or was, and tea has long since ceased to be served to passersby. Thanks to the war, the place is now crammed full-time with the solitary and the companionless: two ageing spinsters, a retired music hall turn called Mr Prest, and the dreaded Thwaites. A bully with a serious Daily Mail habit, Thwaites is idiotic, and never more so than when he’s in a good mood (“And what of my Lady of the Roach? How doth she disport herself this morning?”). Nevertheless, he’s inescapable, all-powerful: the “President in Hell”.
If The Slaves of Solitude is wonderful on love and loneliness (and it really is), it’s even better at showing the effect of the war on those without some obviously heroic role to play: Miss Roach’s strange pride when telling people of the loss of her home to a German bomb is at once upsetting and touching. The blackout both shrinks and expands lives, but either way, everyone is weary; even the dawn seems somehow to have been Bevin-conscripted, harnessed to the war effort like everything else. Hamilton carefully and brutally strangles the myth that wartime inevitably brought people together. Even as the nation fights fascism, a dictator is abroad at home. At the Rosamund Tea Rooms, he keeps his eye on the sugar and butter, carefully noting poor Miss Roach’s use of them both.
