Patrick Hamilton - Twopence Coloured

Patrick Hamilton, Twopence Coloured (Faber Finds)

Patrick Hamilton was 24 when his third novel, Twopence Coloured, was published. After too long out of print, the Faber Finds series has given us the chance of comparing and contrasting with Hamilton's later, better known work.

The story follows the career of Jackie Mortimer, an actress of particularly good looks and some ambition, through a series of episodes that provide a vehicle for portraits and satires on the theatre in London and the provinces.

Theatre producers are seedy, middle-aged men with cigars, the acting profession is tawdry, threadbare and takes place in a twilight world behind the garish glamour of lights and curtains. Thus, one might think that Hamilton at this stage was a somewhat one-dimensional writer of character, his plot predictable and nothing is likely to surprise.

That isn't the case as the final chapters do take an unexpected turn and the ending is certainly not what I expected. Early Hamilton lacks the sinister, exploitative edge of the West Pier trilogy or Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. While there are glimpses of the gin-stained heartlessness and cynical manipulation of his major books, which comes to the final disintegration of style and morality in Unknown Assailant, this is more straight-forward and relatively innocent account of London theatreland. In fact, one might be taken aback by what a sensible girl Jackie is and how little grief befalls her.

The world of matiness and stage doors is understood all too well by Hamilton's keen eye,

The plots of these melodramas....dealing as they did, exclusively and traditionally with infamously monocled scoundrels, pathetically credulous young women, oily-mannered (but black-hearted) solicitors, young men vaguely on His Majesty's Service (but with plenty of time for white flannels, father-defying, and yachting caps)....

and he is already brilliant at putting a character's sincere feelings in contrast to the superficial world they inhabit,

And it caused her to recall, in a sad mist, the very great beauty of their little time together. And it struck her that her spirit had been alive and poignant then, and that it was dead and beautiless now, and that this ornate chattering and idle gossiping around her, this foolish orchestra and foolish play, this tawdry, stuffy, smoke-ridden foyer- were irrelevant and very paltry phenomena to one whose spirit had once been alive.

Twopence Coloured is not an early curio of a writer who went on to become greater but one of his several books, worthy of attention in its own right, at a stage in the trajectory of his career when the balance in his world view had not yet tilted towards a crueller and meaner interpretation of human nature.