Craven House

By Patrick Hamilton

Book Overview

All his novels are terrific' Sarah Waters

Patrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0349141517
• ISBN13: 9780349141510
• Release Date: February 2024
• Publisher: Abacus (UK)
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Craven House - A Book You Can Live In

Craven House by Patrick Hamilton is a truly engaging read. Hamilton's style and descriptions might remind readers of some of the masterpieces of Victorian fiction, those books which you can become so immersed in that you feel as though you are a part of their worlds. This novel is an intricate tapestry of intermingled lives, all centring on the ever-changing, yet paradoxically ever-constant boarding house in the work's name. The boarding house, in a sense, is the main character, as it observes the many changes in the lives of those who stay in it. Craven House sees youth, death, burgeoning friendships, developing love, new arrivals, the departure of old friends, friendly squabbles, and family quarrels. When a reader picks up Craven House, he or she is thrust into times of the past when bobbed hair is one of those "modern airs". The reader experiences the anguish of Elsie's unrequited love, the fervor of Master Wildman when pursuing prospects of love and playwriting, and the audacity of Audrey speaking back to her employer. Once involved in this depiction, which gradually builds, crescendo-like, to a tense climax, readers may not want to leave. At the very least, you'll want to read it again.