Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Patrick Hamilton
Black Spring Press 2007
The Gorse Trilogy is made up of Patrick Hamilton’s final three novels, The West Pier, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, and Unknown Assailant, originally published in 1951, 1953, and 1955 respectively. It tells the story of – or, rather, three stories about – Ralph Gorse, a small time Home Counties confidence trickster in the years after the First World War. Seven years after the appearance of the last, Hamilton succumbed to the alcoholism that had dominated his adult life and – regrettably – the quality of this collection of novels mirrors his decline. The first, The West Pier, stands up to comparison with earlier works the Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky trilogy, Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude. Gorse’s amoral development is depicted with typical black humour, and the Brighton of the time brought vividly to life in all its seediness, cheap thrills and almost-innocent pleasures. Graham Greene, who knew what he was talking about, said it was the best novel about Brighton ever written. I don’t know if he excluded his own from the competition, or indeed if there was much competition, but the praise is well-deserved. I followed Gorse’s duping of the young sweet-shop assistant Esther Downes and of Ryan, his upstanding old school acquaintance, with horrified fascination and, although the final outcome was inevitable, I nevertheless hoped that things might turn out differently. I think it is this mixture of grudging admiration for Gorse’s methods with sympathy for his victims that distinguishes this novel from the later two. Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse is funnier, but as all the characters are portrayed as singularly unattractive, it is difficult to care much what happens to them. Instead, the main interest is in the elaborate ploys Gorse uses to dupe his next female victim, Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, in the relentlessly depressing Reading of the 1920s. The vicious humour is used to deflate not only Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s pretensions, but also those of her acquaintances at The Friar, the made-over “hostelry” where they spend their pointless evenings. Major Parry’s attempts at writing war poetry are ruthlessly dissected and mocked, as are estate agent Mr Stimpson’s efforts to solve crossword puzzles and his sordid dealings with his “ladies of the night”. As in his earlier novels Hamilton is particularly good at parodying the way people talk: the cod-Shakespearean, the patronising Oirish used with Mary the maid, and the Wardour Street slang used by those “in the know”. The problem, however, is that his Marxist anger at the class-bound society of pre-war England, although it produces some fine comic set pieces, detracts from the novel as a whole. Similarly his diatribe about cars, prophetic though it now seems, looks more like delayed bitterness about the accident that seriously injured him in the thirties than a logical part of the narrative. In the end, we are left with a bitter taste, and with Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s “rich, regal, mouthy, throaty, fruity, haughty and objectionable voice, … a recognised noise in the wind and desolation of the hopeless and helpless sea-front” at Worthing. But, problematic as it is, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse is far superior to the final volume of the trilogy, Unknown Assailant, which runs to barely 100 pages. The details of Gorse’s plot to defraud Ivy, the spinster barmaid , a more stupid and less romantic version of Ella in Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky, and her father are glossed over, and Hamilton’s razor-sharp observation of manners and mores seems to have deserted him. It is hinted that Gorse will hang, but it is difficult to see why, as the rewards for his deceptions are modest indeed. Perhaps Hamilton intended to increase his amorality and the seriousness of his crimes in later volumes but just lost interest in his creation as, regrettably, we do too. Unknown Assailant is not a fitting epitaph for this underrated novelist who – at his best, which was most of the time – was very good indeed.
27th August 2007
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hamilt.htm
See also: Craven House
Through A Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton
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