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Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton Paperback – 10 July 2008
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBlack Spring
- Publication date10 July 2008
- Dimensions13 x 2.9 x 19.5 cm
- ISBN-100948238399
- ISBN-13978-0948238390
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Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick HamiltonPaperback
Product details
- Publisher : Black Spring; Reprint edition (10 July 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0948238399
- ISBN-13 : 978-0948238390
- Dimensions : 13 x 2.9 x 19.5 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 679,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 5,820 in Biographies on Novelist & Playwrights
- 7,504 in Literary Theory & Movements
- Customer reviews:
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The most extraordinary relationship is that with Patrick's elder brother, Bruce. Although based in Barbados for most of his adult life, Bruce is the one unrelentingly solid pillar in Patrick's unstable world. Himself a published novelist, Patrick's success and well-being remain his overriding concern. Despite long periods in which Patrick all but ignores him, lies to him and resents his moral shadow, Bruce never wavers in his support and admiration, negotiating his way through Patrick's neurotic need to nail his colours to whatever mast comes to hand, whether political - his not altogether convincing flirtation with communism, to his later shift to the right - and to his sexual infatuations and callous indifference to the feelings of his wives.
With skill Nigel Jones weaves the intricacies of this claustrophobically close family into serious, balanced and frequently perceptive insights into the writer. Patrick's world was a narrow one, London and its suburbs and more particularly the literary watering holes and underside of displaced individuals like himself. Although it is the film world that brings Patrick the public profile and wealth to further pursue his indulgences, it is the best of the novels that most fully reveal the originality of his talent. Both "The Slaves of Solitude" and "Hangover Square", now re-discovered and republished, should ensure that Patrick Hamilton is once more widely read. This wholly absorbing, involved but dispassionate biography itself deserves a wide readership and is likely to send most to explore the work of this wonderfully talented and self-destructive man.
Another important event in Patrick Hamilton’s world view came through his family and their declining fortunes around the time of the first world war, which led to him moving into a series of boarding houses, cheap hotels and rented rooms, mostly with his mother. This insight into the world of genteel poverty and dispossessed, lonely people marked him as a writer, as did his reliance on alcohol and his time spent with streetwalkers and in public houses.
This book takes us through Hamilton’s life – his marriages, the road accident he had which affected him greatly and, most importantly, his work. This includes his early love of poetry, novels and plays. At times you feel that the author had so much information available from his brother Bruce that the relationship was given possibly more importance than it merited. However, this is a good assessment of his work, life and how his reputation has changed over the years. It is a shame that his works have been often neglected over the years, as was a powerful and important author. If you are interested in what made him the writer he was, then this is a good account of his life and work.
Hamilton's subject matter - lonely, confused people trying to cope with life usually through alcohol and false friendships - is depressing but his skill as a writer keeps the reader enthralled.
It comes as no surprise from this book to learn that Hamilton's own life mirrored that of many of his characters and he died of alcoholism in his late 50s.
His life was marked by horrific road accident that scarred him physically and mentally and his relations were women were odd, to say the least, but Nigel Jones makes little of this.
Instead we have a rather plodding account of someone who spent most of his time in the same part of the world, did not travel much and seems to have lived such an uneventful existence that one wonders whether a biography of this length was even necessary.
In fact, it is through the eyes of Hamilton's brother Bruce - and not the biographer's - that we get any insight at all.
Jones uses so much material from Hamilton's brother - who wrote a memoir and gave him access to unpublished material - that Bruce should have been given a co-billing.
This is not to say that this book is not worth reading.
Jones gives a good interpretation of Hamilton's works and his presentation of Hamilton's eccentric father is lively and amusing. However, overall it is a rather run of the mill performance.


