Gratititude to Abacus should be unconfined for making this book available, having been for so long unobtainable and other plans to re-issue it having come to nothing.
At 19 years old, Patrick Hamilton had the blueprint for his mature work already in place and this novel is tremendously assured and confidently made. It is his last work, in Unknown Assailant, that is the more questionable, the booze having got to him, the callous treatment of innocence having got out of hand and the prose having collapsed into little more than notes towards a novel.
With the hindsight of knowing all what was to follow, though, Monday Morning is very familiar Hamilton territory, set in the transient world of London hotels, infatuation forever being led on, one suspects, to unrequitedness and, in what is understandably a bildungsroman, first encounters with alcohol culture in theatrical circles.
In many ways it prefaces the later work by having its main character actually differentiate between being 'in love' and 'Love'. His more mature characters, like Bone, the hapless victim of his own sorry devotions in Hangover Square, have lost that level of awareness.
Anthony is delayed, delayed and delayed again in beginning work on his novel, would prefer to be a poet but there is no money in that and is relieved when his applications for jobs in journalism are unsuccessful. In the end, his pursuit of the fickle Diane apparently over, he writes his great poem, two having been printed in Poetry Review, but this inability to forge a career path seems to parallel his blighted courtship of first one love and then another. It is the way in that one so swiftly follows the other that we suspect Anthony of being no more than the 'in love' he regards as not the real thing and not in possession of the Love he mistakes it for.
It is all beautifully done and were we not in possession of the novels that came after, we wouldn't think we could see what's coming. It looks the theme on which all successive variations were based on. But we should be wary of assuming we know as much.
It arrived at about 11 a.m yesterday morning, wasn't begun until early afternoon and was finished by 9 p.m. with only essential functions attended to in the meantime. It's been a long time coming but it was worth waiting for.
