Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, a very satisfying novel about British life during World War 2 that was first published in 1947, is one of the funniest and most melancholy books about communal dining and living that I’ve read in a long time. Hamilton focuses on a woman known as Miss Roach who has taken up residence at the Rosamond Tea Rooms in Thames Lockdon, a fictional suburb of London, after bombings in London.
The Rosamond Tea Rooms, however, isn’t as pastoral as it might sound: Miss Roach has her own dingy-sounding room but at mealtime she must contend with the likes of Mr. Thwaites, a blowhard who loves goading her. Here’s what one tenant thinks of Mr. Thwaites: “Mr. Prest thought that the old man was a noisy, nattering, messy piece of work who ought to be in a mental home.” This observation sums up Hamilton’s arch tone; he’s unsparing with his characters, even Miss Roach, the most sympathetic, who is the recipient of all sorts of verbal abuse.
During the course of the book, Miss Roach, who works for a publisher and is (or maybe wants to be?) something of bluestocking, meets an American lieutenant from Wilkes-Barre and looks forward to a German-born friend, the comb-pinching Vicki Kugelmann, moving in at the Rosamond Tea Rooms. I don’t think it spoils much to say that neither relationship works out very well, particularly given the amount of cocktails—sometimes a gin and French for Miss Roach—everyone consumes at the local pub and the lounge at the Rosamond Tea Rooms. Christmas is especially hellacious. There’s lots of cutting, childish conflict in the book, psychological homefront conflict that parallels the horror of war.
Perhaps the most palpable effect of the war on the residents of Thames Lockdon is the blackout. Hamilton beautifully contrasts darkness with light, juxtaposing opposites such as crowds/solitude and even, far in the background but omnipresent and wearing on everyone’s nerves, Axis/Allies. On page one, for example, Hamilton first calls London a “crouching monster” then brings the reader to Thames Lockdon. “The conditions were those of intense war, intense winter, and intensest black-out in the month of December.” When an evening train arrives, though, Hamilton offers a phrase that initially sounds almost optimistic, “Torches came flashing on and going out like fireflies. These fireflies went away in all directions in an atmosphere which was one blended of release, of caution in the blackness, and of renewed painful awareness of the cold.” Miss Roach is among those fireflies (two bugs in one?), and she makes her way to the Rosamond Tea Rooms through a town whose architecture features “the jostling of the graceful and genuine and old by the demented fake and ye-olde.”
Miss Roach is, as I mentioned, the most sympathetic of Hamilton’s main characters, one of the slaves of his title, a person for whom too much contact with other people really is hell. She finds a bit of quiet and aloneness in the last book’s final pages, after seeing the afore-mentioned Mr. Prest perform at the theater. In one of the book’s key paragraphs, Miss Roach wonders “what exact motive Mr. Prest had in being alive—if, and by what means, this seemingly empty, utterly idle and silent man justified his existence…”
I particularly like that phrase because one might wonder the same about Miss Roach: though we occasionally see her read manuscripts and know she was a schoolmistress, Hamilton gives her a horribly unflattering name and seems to deprive her of a rich intellectual life. Miss Roach even grows increasingly petty as Mr. Thwaites and Vicki Kuglemann torture her more, even thinking Vicki “had always been a filthy eater, by the way, but that had been a mere detail.” Still, poor Miss Roach—a human spot of light who recognizes the difficulties of literal and metaphorical darkness, as well as the war—just wants to be treated with respect and left alone to face life’s real dangers rather than mean teasing, something I think most of us probably consider crucial aspects of existence that require no justification.
Disclaimers: The Slaves of Solitude was a gift from a friend who works in a bookstore. Thank you very much! I know the book’s publisher, New York Review Books, through discussions about translated literature.
Up Next: Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption.
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