The West Pier can’t have been the first novel by Patrick Hamilton I read because my Penguin is dated 1986, and my copy of Hangover Square is dated 1985. I know I read a review of The West Pier in Time Out, that finished “further Hamilton re-issues, please”, but was that before or after I saw Gorse glaring up at me from the bookshop table in David Parfitt’s cover illustration? It captures him rather well, that picture, that look of smelling something unpleasant under his nose that he could never quite shake off.
“The best novel written about Brighton” said Graham Greene according to the blurb, but that strikes me as a sort of back-handed compliment, carrying as it does the sly suggestion that everyone really knows that it is Brighton Rock.
I would agree with most Hamilton admirers that this is not his best work, but I think I would have to say that it is my favourite, close to my heart for reasons that will become clear.
Hamilton was writing in the early fifties but The West Pier is set in 1921, with a prologue in 1913. The main characters are seen first as schoolboys, then as young men. What fascinated me was the way so little seemed to have changed. His detailed description of the way teenage boys behave seemed closer to my own experience than anything else I had read. Much as I love The Catcher in the Rye, this is adolescence, English style.
And later, the rituals of “getting off” with the opposite sex rang painfully true, as did the pairing of the tall, willowy beautiful girl with her short, dumpy and less attractive friend. Stocky, determined Gertrude, condemned to be one of the “other ones”, who must always accept being paired off together in the courting rituals that take place on the west pier itself.
The west pier was more or less intact when I first knew it, but already closed to the public. The ancient pre-decimal slot machines had been removed to an arcade on the seafront. You could buy a bag of old pennies to work them with. There was a figure of a sailor in a glass case, who laughed maniacally for about three minutes when a coin was deposited in the slot.
I had a friend, now sadly no longer with us, who lived in Brighton, and was a fellow-admirer of this book. We used to imagine what a good film the story would make, and my friend suggested that the laughing sailor would be an appropriate recurring image for Gorse’s trickery. The film would end, he suggested, on a freeze-frame of the final image in the book, Gorse’s face set grimly as he hunches over the steering wheel, speeding towards London and a dubious future.
I was fascinated that Hamilton described Over Street as a slum. When I first knew it, it was home to students at Sussex University. In the novel, Esther Downes, daughter of a worker at the nearby railway station lives there. In one of the most striking passages of the book, we are told that despite being a porter and therefore despised, Mr Downes considered that he had risen in life, because his father had tried to make a living by running behind horse carriages and offering to carry the bags when they reached their destination.
It’s quite clear that Gorse is what we would today call a psychopath, but the book is all the stronger for not using any psychological jargon. Hamilton doesn’t need it. The descriptions of Gorse’s behaviour, and the disquiet he arouses in people are quite enough to tell us what is going on. All the tell-tale indicators are there. The general malevolence towards the world, expressed by puncturing strangers’ bicycle tyres, the races in the bath that he subjects his pet mice to and the hints of something strange sexually. Hamilton anticipated Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley by several years.
The film we imagined never did get made, but Gorse came to television, in the shape of Nigel Havers, in the series The Charmer. This was an adaptation of the second book of the trilogy, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, with an ending invented by the screen writer, Allan Prior. The screenplay was published as a novel and this is a good read for admirers of Hamilton and his compelling creation Ernest Ralph Gorse.
The Good Reader 