The Slaves of Solitude

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at last she put out the light, and turned over, and adjusted the pillow, and hopefully composed her mind for sleep - God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us'

I never ever ever ever ever want to live in a boarding house -- and by logical extension in one of those stupid hippie commune houses where everyone pools their money from their jobs at the incense store and grows vegetables using refortified, sustainable, organic feces and then gets into a fist fight about who gets to eat the last Pop Tart because there's no individual property (and because modern 'hippies' are really, really dumb). Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-02-02 18:01:46 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40053906 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Woolgar gives a remarkable performance, portraying a woman so afraid of intimacy that she won’t tell people her first name. In her movement, she has the defensive graceless quality of a new-born foal, and yet in the way she kisses Pike you spot the unfettered passions and needs that lurk beneath her exterior.urn:lcp:slavesofsolitude0000hami_h4p9:epub:8da74b9e-b0e2-4387-9554-9dc0c86277db Foldoutcount 0 Identifier slavesofsolitude0000hami_h4p9 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t03z8bw5m Invoice 1652 Isbn 0141181648 In his large, flat, moustached face (with its slightly flattened nose, as though someone in the past had punched it), in his lethargic yet watchful brown eyes, in his way of walking and his way of talking, there could be discerned the steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic quality of the lifelong trampler through the emotions of others, of what Miss Roach would call the “bully.” That steady look with which as a boy he would have torn off a butterfly’s wing, with which as a boy he would have twisted another boy’s wrist, with which as a man he would have humiliated a servant or inferior, was upon him as he now looked at Miss Roach; it never entirely left him. He had money of his own and he had lived, resounded through boarding-houses and private hotels all his life. Such places, with the timid old women they contained, were hunting grounds for his temperament – wonderfully suited and stimulating to his peculiar brand of loquacity and malevolence.’ The Slaves of Solitude is set in the winter of 1943. We are in the Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house, in Henley-on-Thames. Miss Roach, an educated middle-class “worthy spinster dame” who works in publishing, has fled London during the Blitz and has taken up residence here. She is lonely, and has little in common with the other residents: odious Mr Thwaites, a pompous, prejudiced and pretentiously phrase-making old man, Mr Prest, a retired actor who misses the bright lights of St Martin’s Lane, two guests Miss Steele and Mrs Barratt, and Mrs Payne, the owner. They didn’t talk, they didn’t laugh, they didn’t seem to enjoy their food, they didn’t seem to go out, they didn’t seem to have any interests, they didn’t seem to like each other much, they didn’t even seem to hate each other, they didn’t seem to do anything. All they seemed to do was to crawl in one by one, murmur a little to the waitress, mutter little requests to pass the salt, shift in their chairs, occasionally modestly cough or blow their noses, sit, eat, wait, eat, sit, and at last crawl out again, one by one… After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as Rope's End in America).

Ok, so this review is a rambling mess of disconnectedness, which is exactly as it should be. So here's why you should read The Salves of Solitude (see, I did it again!): One of Hamilton’s finest novels… The Slaves of Solitude is a pitch-perfect comedy, in which all the passions and tensions of war are enacted in a seedy boarding house in Henley-on-Thames.” I said,’ he said, looking at her, ‘your friends seem to be mightily distinguishing themselves as usual.’But wait, I'll quote some of the incredibly funny lines and paragraphs that had me in stitches. On second thought, that won't work either, because they just sound stupid taken out of context. Perfect dialogue, but you had to be there. This remark is Mr Thwaites' way of referring to Russian victories on the eastern front. He himself was an admirer of Hitler before the war, and is rabidly opposed to communism; the success of the Russian armies in the Allied cause is therefore a source of displeasure to him, though he dare not admit as much, so he seeks to dissociate himself from it by gratuitously associating the Russians with Miss Roach, while at the same time devaluing it by the dismissive phrase, "as usual". Miss Roach attempts to counter this move, which she understands very well, by remaining silent, but Mr Thwaites insists on repeating it, so the code of polite conversation forces her to reply, first by pretending not to understand: "Who're my friends?""Your Russian friends," says Thwaites. "They're not my friends," says Miss Roach, "any more than anybody else." And when Mrs Barratt, who shares the table, comes to her support by saying, "You must admit they're putting up a wonderful fight, Mr Thwaites", he replies, "Oh yes ... They're putting up a fight all right."

THEN: from Skippy Dies to Cat's Eye - now, here's a little goodreads trivia question for those of you playing the home game. What weird filament of theme/motif unites THESE two?The first review I did of this book, which I'm leaving up (below) despite the shame of it (::blushy face::), has an inaccuracy in it that I'd like now to take a moment to correct. Her English accent was curiously in keeping with her cigarette smoking – a little too excellently polished, a little too much at ease, and conscious of being so.’