Modern Books and Cinema Club

Patrick Hamilton's (1904–1962) books are filled with gin and jealousy and depict obsessive desire in oppressive circumstances. His early financial success funded his heavy drinking, but also allowed him to write some of the best fiction of the 20th century. Often cited as Hamilton's greatest work, Hangover Square (1941) is a pitch-black comedy of alcoholism, madness and murder in London before the second world war.

Set during the agonising weeks and months leading to Second World War, Hangover Square tells the tense story of a George Harvey Bone whose ambivalence for the woman he is pursuing (who has no interest in him) is manifested in two psychological states, between which he flips without warning. In one state he yearns for her, yet in the other has only one purpose – to kill her. As the book progresses and Bone gets more and more intense, Hamilton precisely describes a number of mental symptoms while never sensationalising Bone’s condition. Without introducing political material on Hitler's rise to power as the forces of war begin to overwhelm Britain, Bone's deteriorating mind makes this an impressive character study and an oblique (and bleak) look at beleaguered prewar London. Goodreads

Hamilton started writing Hangover Square on Christmas Day 1939. He completed it in February 1941, delivering it to his publishers a month later. Hangover Square was immediately lauded on its publication. James Agee called it "a magnificent thriller" (Daily Express); John Betjeman referred to it as being in "the top class of English novels" (The Spectator). Such was the novel's success that it was rapidly adapted for a film which was released in 1945.

This is an online meetup where the first half of Hamilton's book is discussed. (first six parts)

In 1945 German director John Brahm adapts Hamilton's novel Hangover Square (1941) into an American horror film using the same title. The screenplay was written by Barre Lyndon (Britsh playwright and screenwriter), who made a number of changes to the novel, including transforming George Harvey Bone into a psychotically murderous classical composer-pianist and setting the story in Edwardian London during the summer of 1903. The film stars Laird Cregar (a talented character actor of imposing build), Linda Darell and George Sanders and was released in New York City on February 7, 1945, two months after Cregar suffered a fatal heart attack.
Hangover Square (1945) is often compared with Brahm's preceding film collaboration with screenwriter Lyndon, The Lodger (1944) where the same male acting duo - Cregar and Sanders- stars. Like in Hangover Square both male actors were engaged again in a battle between good and evil at the dawn of criminal psychology. But unlike The Lodger there will be no mystery about the killer’s identity in this film – instead Hangover Square is a portrayal of a man’s mind unravelling under the increasing torment of his hidden tendencies.

This meetup group is organised to discuss both Hamilton's novella and Brahm's film.
Details:
- Finish reading Hamilton's novel.
- Rent the film using one of the available streaming services and watch it in your own time.
- At 8.00pm EET time the online meeting will start to discuss book & adaptation.
Film: Hangover Square (1945)
director: John Brahm
Running Time: 1h 16 min

Crash is a novel by British author J.G. Ballard completed towards the end of 1970 but first published in 1973. It would become the first novel of Ballard's “urban disaster triptych”, followed by Concrete Isand (1974) and High-Rise (1975), and is, perhaps, his most famous novel nowadays and certainly his most infamous.

The novel follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents.
The condensed linking of sexual desires and car crashes in Crash, (according to Paul Kincaid 'a powerful image of technologised death'), comsumed a seven-year period and were rehearsed in different forms before the novel: short stories collected as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), essays, interviews, an art installation, an unperformed play and a drama-documentary.

The subject matter meant that Crash was, of course, controversial. This appears not to have been intentional on Ballard’s part. In an acute study of the novel, Paul March-Russell shows that Ballard was short of money at this time and so desperately needed the novel to be a bestseller. Indeed, he worked very closely with his editor, Tom Maschler, cutting the novel down hugely in length and trying to make it into something with wide appeal. But he couldn’t help himself: this was what the novel was about, the car crash as aphrodisiac, fantasies of making love to the actress Elizabeth Taylor in the back of a crashed car, using gaping wounds in a damaged body as a new sex organ. It didn’t help that he made the whole thing especially personal by giving his protagonist his own name, James Ballard. (J.G. Ballard himself was involved in a serious car accident when his Ford Zephyr left the road and overturned, an experience that germinated the ideas crystallised in Crash ).

The book was never the bestseller J.G. Ballard wanted, but it became a cult success that continued to sell for decades after many more immediately popular books had faded from view. In 1996 Canadian director David Cronenberg adapted Ballard's novel using the same title. Like in the case of the book, the film's initial release was met with intense controversy and opened to highly divergent reactions from critics; It has since developed a cult following and is now considered to be one of Cronenberg's best films.

This meetup group is organised to discuss Ballard's novel in relation to Cronenberg's film.

Details:
- Read Ballard's Crash (1973)
- Rent the film using one of the available streaming services and watch it in your own time.
- At 8.00pm EET time the online meeting will start to discuss book & adaptation.
Film: Crash (1996)
director: David Cronenberg
Running Time: 1h 40 min