Menu. Still, it was the funniest book I've read in months, and the cruel, completely ridiculous Mr Thwaites was a revelation. Running time: 2 hours and 5 minutes including an interval. Being poor, what this meant was that we would be crammed onto a coach, with 50 other unhappy holidaymakers, and driven to one of the nearby seaside towns, Bridlington or Scarborough. This article about a 1940s novel is a stub. La Multresse Solitude (circa 1772 1802) was a historical figure and heroine in the fight against slavery on French Guadeloupe. The jacket description of Hamiltons. In it the Second World War is almost a character in itself, driving people from their homes, throwing the country into oppressive darkness and acting as a sort of 'petty pilferer' of everything from butter and sugar to cigarettes and nail polish. It was published in 1947 and reissued by New York Review Books Classics in 2007. In some ways, my other favorite British WWII writer, Olivia Manning, falls into the same category of a sleeper novelist, someone who didn't produced much but should be known for what he/she has written. Heres a buried treasure restored to the light of day. 3 out of 5 stars. It is December 1943 and Miss Enid Roach, a spinster in her late thirties, has been living in the Rosamund Tea Rooms for a year after being bombed out of her flat in London. Reading some novels is like mountaineering (the North Face of Dosto), other novels are like an unpleasant bruising fall into an open manhole (. When I say "social history", though, understand that it is social. In my opinion it is a perfect book, yes, a masterpiece, but don't ask me to tell you why. Apparently written, in the most part, in a partial drunken stupor from his bed in his own Thames Lockdon during the last two years of the war it offers a fictionalised first hand account of the oppresive nature of too many bodies sharing too small a space, Hamilton being the great chronicler of the working classes of the period preferring to highlight the meanness that people allowed to creep in to their lives and the general air of hopelessness that permeated their existence, if it wasn't the blitz that was going to kill them out there, away from the city itself, then it was going to be the boredom and each other and the inexorable slide towards penury bought about by a general lack of any other option as the war effort took away more and more of what made people live and not just exist. But it can tell you everything else, and will, whether you want to know or not. Miss Roach becomes romantically involved with one of them, Lieutenant Pike, beginning a relationship centred on the local pub and kissing on a bench. THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE. She has been the subject of legends and a symbol of women's resistance in the struggle against slavery in the history of the island. Hamilton has an amazing alacrity of style that while probing the dreariness of these people's lives constantly engages us in the macro dramas that make up their internal and external lives. ), For so long, this one was destined for five stars. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. We would mournfully cast our eyes over the cheap plastic souvenirs in the seemingly endless rows of local shops and kiosks before heading for a cold, windy, and dirty beach. The Slaves of Solitude, published in 1947, is a novel about wartime in which war is deep background. (Please God, never let me have to live in a boarding house! 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