Back to bookblogging. 
A couple of weeks ago, I read The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, reprint edition from the NYRB publishing house.
Originally published just a couple of years after World War II, it tells the story of the war in England on a very, very, very small scale. It’s a most fascinating book, with an introduction provided by David Lodge. (Who, besides his Catholic, academic and mid-life crisis-themed novels, wrote one, Out of the Shelter,  about a boy in England during World War II – it was his first, I believe. )
From the publisher’s description:

England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That’s when Miss Roach’s troubles really begin.

Don’t get the idea that it’s all madcap and everything, because it’s not. There are some very funny bits, and the character of Mr. Thwaites, a bombastic fool who likes to break out into faux-Elizabethan dialect from time to time, is simply brilliantly, corrosively funny.
But it being a wartime novel, even though the war is mostly at a distance, there is an undercurrent of sadness here, but more than that – a steady sense of desperation amid feelings of fear and powerlessness. What the book expresses so brilliantly is how lives are changed under the spectre of war – as if we are put into one huge elevator which is stuck for the foreseeable future. We befriend those we might shun in a different context, our passions and interests are pounded out of us and while we certainly want to be safe again, we mostly, at a point, just want it all to end.

It is interesting that the Vicki Kugelmann who becomes the bane of Miss Roach’s existence is German. She has lived in England since childhood, but bears a trace of an accent still and only occasionally hints at her preferences for some things Teutonic. The characters wonder, idly, if she might be a spy, but not in a serious manner. She is mostly a faded, dated clown who presumes, disrupts and attempts to dominate the situation. I don’t think Hamilton intended any kind of clumsy analogy here – I think what he is doing is simply adding another dimension of the tension that this character brings into the boarding house – that she is a German. It’s a tribute to his craft that as I try to imagine the story with, say, another Englishwoman as that invading character or even, oh, an Italian – it just doesn’t work. Vicki is…Vicki. She is who she is and she does what she does.
Here is a fine, moving paragraph to give you a sense of the book:
 Oh, this world (thought Miss Roach as they sped along) into which I have been born! And oh this war, through which it is my destiny to pass! (Though pass was not the word, for she could not conceive any end to it.) This, she saw, was as much a part of the war as the soldiering, the sailoring ,the bombing, the queuing, the black-out, the crowding, and all the grey deprivations. No imaginable combination of peace-time circumstances could have brought about such a composition of characters as now filled the car and sat on each other’s knees — the ill-looking driver, the German woman, her lonely self, and the three Americans, of presumably totally different classes in civil life, and presumably going to their deaths when the second front began. And yet, she was aware, all over the countryside around, all over the country, cars were racing along, with just such noisy loads to just such destinations. if it wasn’t Americans, it was Poles, or Norwegians, or Dutch, and if it wasn’t sitting on each other’s knees it was singing, and if it wasn’t singing it was sitting on each other’s knees, and whatever it was it was drinking and drinking and screaming and desperate. The war, amongs the innumerable other guises it had assumed, had taken on the character of the inventor and proprietor of some awful low, cosmpolitan night-club.
And next, on the Italian front, History.