In Craven House, among the shifting, uncertain world of the English
boarding house, with its sad population of the shabby genteel on the way
down - and the eternal optimists who would never get up or on - the
young Patrick Hamilton, with loving, horrified fascination, first mapped
out the territory that he would make, uniquely, his own. Although many
of Hamilton's lifelong interests are here, they are handled with a
youthful brio and optimism conspicuously absent from his later work. The
inmates of Craven House have their foibles, but most are indulgently
treated by an author whose world view has yet to harden from scepticism
into cynicism.
The generational conflicts of Hamilton's own
youth thread throughout the narrative, with hair bobbing and dancing as
the battle lines. That perennial of the 1920s bourgeoisie, the 'servant
problem', is never far from the surface, and tensions crescendo
gradually to a resolution one climactic dinnertime.
Craven House - Patrick Hamilton
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£9.99