It's not really the done thing to review novels first published in 1939 but this has been hard to come by until re-issued by Abacus last year. It didn't come very highly recommended so I didn't even rush for it then. It is a satire very much in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels and, as such, different from Hamilton's usual constituency of the gin-soaked twilight world of London and Brighton boarding houses and the seedy downside of glamour.We are off to an unpromising science fiction start with John Sadler being fired into deep space in the Asteradio, a tardis-cum-time machine, but once he lands in Moribundia we are in a familiar and transparently encoded version of 1930's London, Nwotsemaht, after which it will be preferable to refer to all these coded features by spelling them backwards.
Sadler finds it all very strange, from the balloons appearing in the air with the words people are speaking to rheumatism being visible on them by flashes of lightning. Luckily, all such ailments are immediately curable by wonderful products like Nourishine that are endorsed in thought bubbles by all that benefit from them. Nourishine is seen to transform the life and career of a stressed hotel receptionist, just like the adverts said it would.
As much of a story as Impromptu is, he only visits Moribundia for three months and then comes back so it consists of an episodic series of satirrical essays on, in turn, the upper classes, capitalism and advertising, the working classes and literature. Hamilton moved from Marxism to reactionary Conservatism but this work is even handed in satirising both privilege and the underclass, with the well-to-do upright, elegant and noble and the working class living dully repetitive lives with everything provided and nothing to wish for. Thus, for all the obvious targets, it is ambivalent and what at first seems to be a utopia is soon revealed as a dystopia and, as such, it is a better book than promised to be.
Hamilton's usual themes of class, failed love affairs, boorish behaviour and social mores are actually here just as evidently as in the books he is being rediscovered for. He is accurate to the point of cruelty in portraying human behaviour, which begins here with a fine appreciation of how the forthright humour of the cockney is unquestioningly admired by all as brilliant wit. At the other end of the cultural scale, it is accepted by all that the three great writers are Kipling, Newbolt and Buchan,
their supremacy remains unchallenged,
so that there is no critical discourse, and Marxism, which is 'promulgated in a definite system of philosophy known as Scitcelaid', would be greeted with horror,
if they were not hilariously laughed at, in this sane and happy land.
So, beneath the piercing account of a society instantly recognizable as 1930's London, and by no means too dated even now, but described in very opposite terms, is a dark view of the way we live, superficially very funny but with a bleak sub-text.
It took me a long time to get around to reading Impromptu but I'm glad I did. It reads as easily as a comic but reveals itself as more sinister as it progresses, which makes it fit entirely with the rest of Patrick Hamilton who is, as ever, highly recommended.
But I notice among the list of other titles 'by Patrick Hamilton', five other plays beyond the well-known Gaslight, which seems to have quite recently passed into the language in 'gaslighting', and Rope. While that means there are five more plays to read, if not find productions of, they do look very difficult to acquire. We'll see.