Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics) |...

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics) | Patrick Hamilton | The atmospere of London between the wars

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Twenty Thousand St...

	Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics) Patrick Hamilton NYRB Classics, 2008 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Patrick Hamilton may be best known now for the plays Rope and Gaslight and for the classic Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor movies they inspired, but in his heyday he was no less famous for his brooding tales of London life. Featuring a Dickensian cast of pubcrawlers, prostitutes, lowlifes, and just plain losers who are looking for love?or just an ear to bend?Hamilton?s novels are a triumph of deft characterization, offbeat humor, unlikely compassion, and raw suspense. In recent years, Hamilton has undergone a remarkable revival, with his champions including Doris Lessing, David Lodge, Nick Hornby, and Sarah Waters.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is a tale of obsession and betrayal that centers on a seedy pub in a run-down part of London. Bob the waiter skimps and saves and fantasizes about writing a novel, until he falls for the pretty prostitute Jenny and blows it all. Kindly Ella, Bob?s co-worker, adores Bob, but is condemned to enjoy nothing more than the attentions of the insufferable Mr. Eccles; Jenny, out on the street, is out of love, hope, and money. We watch with pity and horror as these three vulnerable and yet compellingly ordinary people meet and play out bitter comedies of longing and frustration.

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The Midnight Bell - What a Pub

It would be wonderful to walk into a pub, or bar inhabited by characters like the ones in these stories, and one can by reading the book. The characters are so well developed, their thoughts, language and conversations so exact that one finds it easy to relate to them and their circumstances. These characters are alive to the reader and these characters know themselves, and still, because of time (1929) and station (working class), cannot do much to improve their plight. Most men have been in a situation similar to Bob with Jenny, and if not, then they have missed both the highs and the anguish of unrequited love, but perhaps are better off in other ways. As I read about Bob, I thought this book should be required reading for young men just starting with romance. The three stories in this book are so real that the reader wants so badly to warn, and to help; if you open this book you will become involved in a new place at a different time with real people -- it won't be casual; it will be real: five stars are too few.

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The atmospere of London between the wars

Patrick Hamilton (1904 - 1962) was an English playwright and novelist, who has an extraordinary number of admirers with glowing reviews cited in the Amazon editorial comments. He has a distinctive style: a Dickensian voice, sympathy for the dispossessed, black humor. Michael Holroyd wrote an excellent introduction to the book in another edition; it captures the "authentic atmosphere of what it was like to live in England between the two world wars".

The book contains a trilogy of novels: "The Midnight Bell", "The Siege of Pleasure" and "The Plains of Cement". Taken together, they describe a seamy side of London between the world wars. An example of his writing:

"How had she done it? How had she gained this hypnotic ascendancy over him - how, from being a pretty and rather piteous little wretch, had she subtly developed into an erotic and deadly drug now utterly indispensable alike to his spiritual and nervous system? And she was nothing else. He could weep with wanting her and her kindness."

Hamilton is a master at creating atmosphere and at making us empathize with the lonely desperation that his characters share.

As Doris Lessing wrote: "Hamilton was a marvelous novelist who's grossly neglected". These three novels are an excellent introduction to his work.

Robert C. Ross 2008

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Small Lives in the Plains of Cement

I had not come across these books or this author until I saw it on an Amazon recommendation but both are certainly worth knowing about. The 3 interrelated short novels include strong character studies and an atmospheric feeling for London between the wars. The main characters are 2 workers in a London pub and a prostitute; with a story fashioned around each.

The first concerns the strange and doomed attraction of a waiter for Jenny Maples, a London prostitute. Bob's backwards and forwards approach to her resembles that of Julian Sorrel in The Red and the Black while his inability to disengage from her after numerous attempts reminds the reader of the protagonist from Of Human Bondage. The second story explains how Jenny became a woman of the street. The final novel completes the triangle in telling the story of the waitress who secretly loves Bob. Spurned by his indifference, she puts up with the measured attentions of Mr. Eccles until she decides that she prefers loneliness to irritation. (Actually, Eccles is a minor character that is masterfully portrayed and another in a long literary line of memorable, eccentric English supporting actors).

There is a sense of spititual and emotional impoverishment in each of the stories which is reflected in the oppressing city environment. None of the stories ends happily but the reader is well prepared for this from the tone of the narrative.

These books are less ambitious than those of Dickens or Trollope but achieve their goal of etching clear, sympathetic portraits of the type of person usually ignored in the arts. Although not memorable in a historical sense, Bob, Jenny and Ella live with the reader long after he closes the book.

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