A master of drab grotesques

Craven House, by Patrick Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton (d. 1962) was a supremely odd fish, a kind of case-study in psychological extremism who drank himself to death at the early age of 58. His later novels, written when the drink was cracking him up, offer the curious spectacle of a mind that has travelled too far into itself, and a writer feeding entirely off his own imagination rather than the world beyond it. Hamilton revivals, which come round every five years or so, usually concentrate on his London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (1929-34), or Hangover Square (1941), but it is nearly two decades since anyone has taken a punt on his second novel, Craven House (1926).

First published in his very early twenties, and here introduced by one of Hamilton’s two modern biographers, Nigel Jones, this belongs to an extinct sub-species of English fiction: the boarding house novel. The domicile of the title lies in ‘Southam’, West London, which looks as if it might be Ealing, and its inhabitants — their progress monitored over a dozen-year period starting in 1913 — include the cheery proprietress, Miss Hatt, a ghastly middle-aged couple named Spicer, sadistic Mrs Nixon and her daughter, Elsie, a soon-to-be orphaned small boy known as ‘Master Wildman’, and a pair of domestic servants hauled in every now and then for (more or less) comic relief.

As with practically everything Hamilton wrote — a tendency here compounded by his trick of seeing the action through Elsie’s and Master Wildman’s eyes — the adult characters are the most terrifying collection of bores and egotists. At the same time Hamilton’s motive in exposing them — Mr Spicer stalking tarts in Hyde Park, Mrs Nixon bullying her meekly acquiescent daughter into stupor — is not merely satirical.