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The West Pier
Subtle beyond his years and inscrutably malevolent, the young Ernest Ralph Gorse hides many unsavoury ambitions beneath his carefully composed veneer.
On a summer holiday in Brighton with two fellow school-leavers, Ryan and Bell, Gorse is irresistibly drawn to the lovely but gullible Esther Downes. Realising that she and Ryan are strongly attracted to each other, he at first relishes the simple challenge of stealing her from his rival; but after the discovery that Esther possesses a reasonable sum of money, he sets in motion a plan that is ruthlessly calculated to destroy her.
On a summer holiday in Brighton with two fellow school-leavers, Ryan and Bell, Gorse is irresistibly drawn to the lovely but gullible Esther Downes. Realising that she and Ryan are strongly attracted to each other, he at first relishes the simple challenge of stealing her from his rival; but after the discovery that Esther possesses a reasonable sum of money, he sets in motion a plan that is ruthlessly calculated to destroy her.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
4 people are currently reading
211 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Hamilton
89 books289 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
He was born Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to writer parents. Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School.
After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as Rope's End in America).
The Midnight Bell (1929) is based upon Hamilton's falling in love with a prostitute, and was later published along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) as the semi-autobiographical trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky (1935).
Hamilton disliked many aspects of modern life. He was disfigured badly when he was run over by a car in the late 1920s: the end of his novel Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), with its vision of England smothered in metal beetles, reflects his loathing of the motor car. However, despite some distaste for the culture in which he operated, he was a popular contributor to it. His two most successful plays, Rope and Gas Light (1938, known as Angel Street in the US), made Hamilton wealthy and were also successful as films: the British-made Gaslight (1940) and the 1944 American remake, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).
Hangover Square (1941) is often judged his most accomplished work and still sells well in paperback, and is regarded by contemporary authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as an important part of the tradition of London novels. Set in Earls Court where Hamilton himself lived, it deals with both alcohol-drinking practices of the time and the underlying political context, such as the rise of fascism and responses to it. Hamilton became an avowed Marxist, though not a publicly declared member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. During the 1930s, like many other authors, Hamilton grew increasingly angry with capitalism and, again like others, felt that the violence and fascism of Europe during the period indicated that capitalism was reaching its end: this encouraged his Marxism and his novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) was a satirical attack of capitalist culture.
During his later life, Hamilton developed in his writing a misanthropic authorial voice which became more disillusioned, cynical and bleak as time passed. The Slaves of Solitude (1947), was his only work to deal directly with the Second World War, and he preferred to look back to the pre-war years. His Gorse Trilogy—three novels about a devious sexual predator and conman—are not generally well thought of critically, although Graham Greene said that the first was 'the best book written about Brighton' and the second (Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse) is regarded increasingly as a comic masterpiece. The hostility and negativity of the novels is also attributed to Hamilton's disenchantment with the utopianism of Marxism and depression. The trilogy comprises The West Pier (1952); Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), dramatized as The Charmer in 1987; and in 1955 Hamilton's last published work, Unknown Assailant, a short novel much of which was dictated while Hamilton was drunk. The Gorse Trilogy was first published in a single volume in 1992.
Hamilton had begun to consume alcohol excessively while still a relatively young man. After a declining career and melancholia, he died in 1962 of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure, in Sheringham, Norfolk.
He was born Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to writer parents. Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School.
After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as Rope's End in America).
The Midnight Bell (1929) is based upon Hamilton's falling in love with a prostitute, and was later published along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) as the semi-autobiographical trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky (1935).
Hamilton disliked many aspects of modern life. He was disfigured badly when he was run over by a car in the late 1920s: the end of his novel Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), with its vision of England smothered in metal beetles, reflects his loathing of the motor car. However, despite some distaste for the culture in which he operated, he was a popular contributor to it. His two most successful plays, Rope and Gas Light (1938, known as Angel Street in the US), made Hamilton wealthy and were also successful as films: the British-made Gaslight (1940) and the 1944 American remake, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).
Hangover Square (1941) is often judged his most accomplished work and still sells well in paperback, and is regarded by contemporary authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as an important part of the tradition of London novels. Set in Earls Court where Hamilton himself lived, it deals with both alcohol-drinking practices of the time and the underlying political context, such as the rise of fascism and responses to it. Hamilton became an avowed Marxist, though not a publicly declared member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. During the 1930s, like many other authors, Hamilton grew increasingly angry with capitalism and, again like others, felt that the violence and fascism of Europe during the period indicated that capitalism was reaching its end: this encouraged his Marxism and his novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) was a satirical attack of capitalist culture.
During his later life, Hamilton developed in his writing a misanthropic authorial voice which became more disillusioned, cynical and bleak as time passed. The Slaves of Solitude (1947), was his only work to deal directly with the Second World War, and he preferred to look back to the pre-war years. His Gorse Trilogy—three novels about a devious sexual predator and conman—are not generally well thought of critically, although Graham Greene said that the first was 'the best book written about Brighton' and the second (Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse) is regarded increasingly as a comic masterpiece. The hostility and negativity of the novels is also attributed to Hamilton's disenchantment with the utopianism of Marxism and depression. The trilogy comprises The West Pier (1952); Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), dramatized as The Charmer in 1987; and in 1955 Hamilton's last published work, Unknown Assailant, a short novel much of which was dictated while Hamilton was drunk. The Gorse Trilogy was first published in a single volume in 1992.
Hamilton had begun to consume alcohol excessively while still a relatively young man. After a declining career and melancholia, he died in 1962 of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure, in Sheringham, Norfolk.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
September 28, 2021
THE BIZARRE CASE OF PATRICK HAMILTON AKA MR SNAKES AND LADDERS
Let’s start with the father – he was posh, loaded, alcoholic, “untrustworthy and vainglorious”, a theosophist, a non-practising barrister and a fascist, and when young he fell in love with a prostitute and married her. That marriage was terminated by her jumping in front of a train (at Wimbledon Station). I don’t know why. This father was also “a truly awful novelist”.
Patrick was born in 1904, son of the second wife. Because his father was a useless spendthrift he had to leave school aged 15. He wrote his first novel aged 19 and it was published when he was 21. Not particularly successful. But his second novel Craven House a year later was a hit. He was already being compared to Dickens, Gissing and Sinclair Lewis at age 22.
When he was 23, he ALSO fell in love with a prostitute. The excruciating account of this affair is recorded in his 1935 novel The Midnight Bell. Read it and shudder.
When he was 24 he wrote a play “Rope”. It was a BIG hit (and was filmed in 1948 by none other than Alfred Hitchcock.) He wrote at age 25 “I am known, established, pursued. The world is truly at my feet.” He didn’t need to write anything else, this play was continually on stage somewhere for the rest of his life.
Got married in 1930 but not to the prostitute. Then, walking home along Earl’s Court Road in London with his wife and sister in January 1932
WHAM
a car hit him. Michael Holroyd says:
For a time his life was in danger, but after some months he made the best recovery possible, though he was left with a withered arm and, despite plastic surgery, marks and scars on his face, particularly his nose, which had been almost torn off.
By now he had become an alcoholic, and also a Communist. He never gave up either. By the 1940s he was on three bottles of whisky a day.
In 1938 came a SECOND monster hit play “Gaslight” (which added the term gaslighting to the English language). This was filmed with none other than Ingrid Bergman in 1944.
Throughout all this he wrote 12 novels, four plays and ten radio plays.
His masterpieces are The Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the three novels that form the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky.
(Note - this information cobbled together from the introductions to all the PH novel I have - the Wiki page is quite deficient.)
THE WEST PIER
We are again deliciously plunged into PH’s patent excruciatingly-observed sociologically precise and psychologically horrible world featuring the romantic illusions and disillusions of a group of four young people who have the bad luck to have a fifth in their midst, a malevolent human tarantula called Ernest Ralph Gorse. He believes he is a superior type of being who can at will bamboozle, confound and defraud all the lesser types in his orbit, and we see him do just that. All his dodges, lies and manipulations work perfectly. There’s no chance of him being exposed. He has perfected the art of gaining trust. Only when they find he had driven off with all the money do they realise they have no idea where he lives, no way of finding him ever again.
The pleasures of this novel are the same as those of The Midnight Bell, which are very great. PH’s humour is deadly, he is a virtuoso of haplessness. At the same time when Gorse gets away with it, you think – well, that is exactly what would happen But I hate it!
When I read in the introduction to the Gorse Trilogy that the next two novels were also all about Gorse scheming to defraud a woman and then getting away with it, my enthusiasm drained away. Much as I love PH, this is too much bleakness. One book of Gorse was enough.
Let’s start with the father – he was posh, loaded, alcoholic, “untrustworthy and vainglorious”, a theosophist, a non-practising barrister and a fascist, and when young he fell in love with a prostitute and married her. That marriage was terminated by her jumping in front of a train (at Wimbledon Station). I don’t know why. This father was also “a truly awful novelist”.
Patrick was born in 1904, son of the second wife. Because his father was a useless spendthrift he had to leave school aged 15. He wrote his first novel aged 19 and it was published when he was 21. Not particularly successful. But his second novel Craven House a year later was a hit. He was already being compared to Dickens, Gissing and Sinclair Lewis at age 22.
When he was 23, he ALSO fell in love with a prostitute. The excruciating account of this affair is recorded in his 1935 novel The Midnight Bell. Read it and shudder.
When he was 24 he wrote a play “Rope”. It was a BIG hit (and was filmed in 1948 by none other than Alfred Hitchcock.) He wrote at age 25 “I am known, established, pursued. The world is truly at my feet.” He didn’t need to write anything else, this play was continually on stage somewhere for the rest of his life.
Got married in 1930 but not to the prostitute. Then, walking home along Earl’s Court Road in London with his wife and sister in January 1932
WHAM
a car hit him. Michael Holroyd says:
For a time his life was in danger, but after some months he made the best recovery possible, though he was left with a withered arm and, despite plastic surgery, marks and scars on his face, particularly his nose, which had been almost torn off.
By now he had become an alcoholic, and also a Communist. He never gave up either. By the 1940s he was on three bottles of whisky a day.
In 1938 came a SECOND monster hit play “Gaslight” (which added the term gaslighting to the English language). This was filmed with none other than Ingrid Bergman in 1944.
Throughout all this he wrote 12 novels, four plays and ten radio plays.
His masterpieces are The Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the three novels that form the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky.
(Note - this information cobbled together from the introductions to all the PH novel I have - the Wiki page is quite deficient.)
THE WEST PIER
We are again deliciously plunged into PH’s patent excruciatingly-observed sociologically precise and psychologically horrible world featuring the romantic illusions and disillusions of a group of four young people who have the bad luck to have a fifth in their midst, a malevolent human tarantula called Ernest Ralph Gorse. He believes he is a superior type of being who can at will bamboozle, confound and defraud all the lesser types in his orbit, and we see him do just that. All his dodges, lies and manipulations work perfectly. There’s no chance of him being exposed. He has perfected the art of gaining trust. Only when they find he had driven off with all the money do they realise they have no idea where he lives, no way of finding him ever again.
The pleasures of this novel are the same as those of The Midnight Bell, which are very great. PH’s humour is deadly, he is a virtuoso of haplessness. At the same time when Gorse gets away with it, you think – well, that is exactly what would happen But I hate it!
When I read in the introduction to the Gorse Trilogy that the next two novels were also all about Gorse scheming to defraud a woman and then getting away with it, my enthusiasm drained away. Much as I love PH, this is too much bleakness. One book of Gorse was enough.
April 21, 2019
Sad to see Hamilton’s powers on the wane here. Very “phoned in”.
2.5
2.5
Read
September 17, 2020 Reluctantly abandoned at 51%
I had high hopes for this book. Patrick Hamilton wrote the play 'Rope' that Hitchcock turned into a film and also wrote the film 'Gaslight' that we get the term gaslighting from, so I expected something good.
'The West Pier is the. the first book of 'The Gorse Trilogy' following the life of the unpleasant Gorse, a sort of Ripley without the charm.
I read the opening and thought I was on to a good thing as I heard a strong, original authorial voice saying:
'There is a sort of man – usually a lance-corporal or corporal and coming from the submerged classes – who, returning to England from military service in distant parts of the earth, does not announce his arrival to his relations. Instead of this he will tramp, or hitchhike, his way to his home, and in the early hours of the morning will be heard gently throwing pebbles up at his wife’s bedroom window.
It is impossible to say whether he does this because he hopes to surprise his wife in some sinful attachment, or whether it has never occurred to him to use the telephone, the telegraph service, or the post. If the latter were the case one might suppose him to be merely unimaginative: but this type of person is actually far from being unimaginative. What concerns us here is that such a person certainly belongs to a type, rare but identifiable. There may exist only one in a hundred thousand, or more, people: but, by a shrewd observer, they can be discerned and classified without mistake.
The main feature which characterizes these people is, of course, their silence – their almost complete dumbness and numbness amidst a busy and loquacious humanity. They are not, in fact, inarticulate: at certain times they will talk at great length. They are able, also, to laugh, though this is usually at a joke of a commonplace, cruel, or dirty nature. But although they are able to talk and laugh, they seem to do this only spasmodically and on the surface: beneath this surface they are dreaming, dully brooding, seeming incessantly and as it were somnambulistically to contemplate themselves and the prospects of their own advantage.
They are almost exclusively a male species. Seventy-five per cent of them belong to the submerged classes: the remaining (and perhaps most interesting) twenty-five per cent are scattered amongst all kinds of higher strata. They all tend to drift into the Army. During wars, or in periods of social upheaval, they appear, as if vengefully, to come into their own, to gain ephemeral power and standing.
As boys at school they are generally bullies, but quiet ones – twisters of wrists in distant corners. As adults, naturally, they can no longer behave in such a way, and some of them wear on their faces what may be a slow, pensive resentment at being thwarted in this matter.
They use few gestures, and, like most great inner thinkers, they are great walkers, plodders of the streets in raincoats.
They are conspicuously silent and odd in their behaviour with their wives or their women. In public houses, or in tea-shops, they are to be seen sitting with women without uttering a word to them, sometimes for as much as an hour on end.'
Unfortunately, these are not just verbal pyrotechnics to hook the reader at the start, they are a fair sample of what all the text is like.
By the time I was a quarter of the way into the novel, the authorial voice that I'd at first found fascinating had begun to wear on me.
Hamilton described the behaviours and motivations of the characters with a cringe-making accuracy that is all insight and no empathy.
It's a relentless flow of 'you-see-how-it-is?' and 'Of-course-we-are-not surprised-by-how-badly-this-is going.' descriptions that seem powered by underlying anger and disgust with the world.
It was slow going. It was a little like drinking vinegar; even when it's the best quality vinegar, it's not something you look forward to doing more of.
I waded on to the middle of the book but it became a chore. The explanations of people's thoughts and motives were laboured and clumsy. The authorial voice (which is almost never silent) was fueled by so much anger and disappointment in the world in general that it was like listening to Lenny Bruce reading his trial transcripts. It didn't help that the story at the heart of this authorial bile seems to be nothing more than a twisted young man maliciously interfering in the lives of two nice but ordinary young people.
By 51% I realised that I was picking up 'The West Pier' because I was supposed to finish it rather than because I want to read it so I reluctantly set it aside.
I had high hopes for this book. Patrick Hamilton wrote the play 'Rope' that Hitchcock turned into a film and also wrote the film 'Gaslight' that we get the term gaslighting from, so I expected something good.
'The West Pier is the. the first book of 'The Gorse Trilogy' following the life of the unpleasant Gorse, a sort of Ripley without the charm.
I read the opening and thought I was on to a good thing as I heard a strong, original authorial voice saying:
'There is a sort of man – usually a lance-corporal or corporal and coming from the submerged classes – who, returning to England from military service in distant parts of the earth, does not announce his arrival to his relations. Instead of this he will tramp, or hitchhike, his way to his home, and in the early hours of the morning will be heard gently throwing pebbles up at his wife’s bedroom window.
It is impossible to say whether he does this because he hopes to surprise his wife in some sinful attachment, or whether it has never occurred to him to use the telephone, the telegraph service, or the post. If the latter were the case one might suppose him to be merely unimaginative: but this type of person is actually far from being unimaginative. What concerns us here is that such a person certainly belongs to a type, rare but identifiable. There may exist only one in a hundred thousand, or more, people: but, by a shrewd observer, they can be discerned and classified without mistake.
The main feature which characterizes these people is, of course, their silence – their almost complete dumbness and numbness amidst a busy and loquacious humanity. They are not, in fact, inarticulate: at certain times they will talk at great length. They are able, also, to laugh, though this is usually at a joke of a commonplace, cruel, or dirty nature. But although they are able to talk and laugh, they seem to do this only spasmodically and on the surface: beneath this surface they are dreaming, dully brooding, seeming incessantly and as it were somnambulistically to contemplate themselves and the prospects of their own advantage.
They are almost exclusively a male species. Seventy-five per cent of them belong to the submerged classes: the remaining (and perhaps most interesting) twenty-five per cent are scattered amongst all kinds of higher strata. They all tend to drift into the Army. During wars, or in periods of social upheaval, they appear, as if vengefully, to come into their own, to gain ephemeral power and standing.
As boys at school they are generally bullies, but quiet ones – twisters of wrists in distant corners. As adults, naturally, they can no longer behave in such a way, and some of them wear on their faces what may be a slow, pensive resentment at being thwarted in this matter.
They use few gestures, and, like most great inner thinkers, they are great walkers, plodders of the streets in raincoats.
They are conspicuously silent and odd in their behaviour with their wives or their women. In public houses, or in tea-shops, they are to be seen sitting with women without uttering a word to them, sometimes for as much as an hour on end.'
Unfortunately, these are not just verbal pyrotechnics to hook the reader at the start, they are a fair sample of what all the text is like.
By the time I was a quarter of the way into the novel, the authorial voice that I'd at first found fascinating had begun to wear on me.
Hamilton described the behaviours and motivations of the characters with a cringe-making accuracy that is all insight and no empathy.
It's a relentless flow of 'you-see-how-it-is?' and 'Of-course-we-are-not surprised-by-how-badly-this-is going.' descriptions that seem powered by underlying anger and disgust with the world.
It was slow going. It was a little like drinking vinegar; even when it's the best quality vinegar, it's not something you look forward to doing more of.
I waded on to the middle of the book but it became a chore. The explanations of people's thoughts and motives were laboured and clumsy. The authorial voice (which is almost never silent) was fueled by so much anger and disappointment in the world in general that it was like listening to Lenny Bruce reading his trial transcripts. It didn't help that the story at the heart of this authorial bile seems to be nothing more than a twisted young man maliciously interfering in the lives of two nice but ordinary young people.
By 51% I realised that I was picking up 'The West Pier' because I was supposed to finish it rather than because I want to read it so I reluctantly set it aside.
March 14, 2016
The first of Patrick Hamilton's final trilogy about an unscrupulous con man called Ernest Ralph Gorse. We follow him from roughly age 12-18 (1914-21) from the grammar school in Brighton where we are introduced to his sadistic disposition. He retains a couple of school friends with whom he re-meets (after having moved to London for a few years to finish school) on a summer holiday which he uses to exploit a local working-class girl. The action is remarkably compact - a couple of months at his first school, a gap of some years, and three weeks one summer.
Hamilton's writing is engaging, clever and reads fast. His characters are frequently awful. His own life apparently had its share of misery - an alcoholic father whose financial shakiness gave his family lots of time in the dreary boarding houses about which he often wrote. Hamilton inherited the mantle, drinking himself to death by the age of 58.
Hamilton's writing is engaging, clever and reads fast. His characters are frequently awful. His own life apparently had its share of misery - an alcoholic father whose financial shakiness gave his family lots of time in the dreary boarding houses about which he often wrote. Hamilton inherited the mantle, drinking himself to death by the age of 58.
November 25, 2010
No one does low intensity dread like Patrick Hamilton. This book introduces perhaps the most loathsome protagonist in literature, the repulsive Gorse, whom we are told is destined for terrible things. The first volume of the Gorse trilogy feels a bit like a prequel however. And the spectacle of watching him wreak misery on some very nice dolts becomes a bit too painful to stay with the book's halfway mark.
August 22, 2020
Very entertaining! Such a simple-seeming style, but you’d recognise the characters anywhere.
September 6, 2021
This is the first of Hamilton's three books about the villainous Ernest Ralph Gorse, and the first Hamilton book I've read.
Gorse gets the perfect introduction in the first chapter, where we see him as a schoolboy, effortlessly seeding discord between his fellow pupils just for the fun of it. When we learn of how he later lures a young girl into a park and leaves her tied up in a shed — again, just for the fun of it — it feels like we're being set up for a book about a very nasty piece of work indeed.
The rest of the novel is about one particular misdeed of the now out-of-school Gorse, as he preys on a working-class girl, Esther, with an elaborate plan to take what little she has away from her. The one criticism I have about the book is that, as Gorse's plan proceeds, it becomes increasingly hard to believe how easily taken in everyone is, to the point where they disbelieve other, more plausible, people. Without spoiling it, Gorse's plan involves some anonymous letters, and he's so obviously the beneficiary of what these letters intend, it's amazing nobody suspects him. Perhaps Hamilton's point is that a working-class girl like Esther is too taken in by Gorse's air of gentlemanliness to do so, but she's led to suspect another, far more gentle, gentleman. Or perhaps it's because Hamilton lets us into Gorse's plans and we know what the other characters don't. All the same, it left me feeling a little unconvinced.
The first chapter, then, is the best, and has some of Hamilton's best writing, as he leads us through how petty schoolboys can be in their bullying, and how easily they can be goaded into turning on one of their own. It's left me tempted to read more by Hamilton, but perhaps not another of his Gorse novels till I've tried something that's considered his better work, like Hangover Square.
Gorse gets the perfect introduction in the first chapter, where we see him as a schoolboy, effortlessly seeding discord between his fellow pupils just for the fun of it. When we learn of how he later lures a young girl into a park and leaves her tied up in a shed — again, just for the fun of it — it feels like we're being set up for a book about a very nasty piece of work indeed.
The rest of the novel is about one particular misdeed of the now out-of-school Gorse, as he preys on a working-class girl, Esther, with an elaborate plan to take what little she has away from her. The one criticism I have about the book is that, as Gorse's plan proceeds, it becomes increasingly hard to believe how easily taken in everyone is, to the point where they disbelieve other, more plausible, people. Without spoiling it, Gorse's plan involves some anonymous letters, and he's so obviously the beneficiary of what these letters intend, it's amazing nobody suspects him. Perhaps Hamilton's point is that a working-class girl like Esther is too taken in by Gorse's air of gentlemanliness to do so, but she's led to suspect another, far more gentle, gentleman. Or perhaps it's because Hamilton lets us into Gorse's plans and we know what the other characters don't. All the same, it left me feeling a little unconvinced.
The first chapter, then, is the best, and has some of Hamilton's best writing, as he leads us through how petty schoolboys can be in their bullying, and how easily they can be goaded into turning on one of their own. It's left me tempted to read more by Hamilton, but perhaps not another of his Gorse novels till I've tried something that's considered his better work, like Hangover Square.
July 29, 2016
This is a postcard of the Hotel Metropole circa 1924:
http://www.wfc2013.org/hotel/bm-1924p...
Are you impressed?
Would going for a drink here turn you into a credulous fool?
If so, it may affect your impressions of The West Pier, you might feel very sorry for Esther. If not, you might simply dismiss her as a very silly girl, not really care very much when she fell for Gorse's unsophisticated con trick and feel superior because you wouldn't have done. You might, alternatively, bristle with indignation because she was a silly girl, did fall for the con when you wouldn't have done, look at her disadvantaged circumstances compared to yours, despair of her limited chances to improve herself and rail at the unfairness of it all.
Here is another postcard of the West Pier to look at while you decide:
http://kafkasworld.com/wp-content/upl...
It now looks like this:
http://ih1.redbubble.net/image.630583...
http://www.wfc2013.org/hotel/bm-1924p...
Are you impressed?
Would going for a drink here turn you into a credulous fool?
If so, it may affect your impressions of The West Pier, you might feel very sorry for Esther. If not, you might simply dismiss her as a very silly girl, not really care very much when she fell for Gorse's unsophisticated con trick and feel superior because you wouldn't have done. You might, alternatively, bristle with indignation because she was a silly girl, did fall for the con when you wouldn't have done, look at her disadvantaged circumstances compared to yours, despair of her limited chances to improve herself and rail at the unfairness of it all.
Here is another postcard of the West Pier to look at while you decide:
http://kafkasworld.com/wp-content/upl...
It now looks like this:
http://ih1.redbubble.net/image.630583...
October 1, 2013
Evocative portrait of its time and place (Brighton, Eng.)
August 13, 2020
Loved this and happy to have two more books in the Gorse trilogy to look forward to. Planning to stagger them a bit so as not to have too much fun at one go. I dont know how Patrick Hamilton books have slipped through my net as the couple i have read are right up my street
October 24, 2015
It's really well written and I got into it very easily. The only problem I had with it was that the plot was so infuriating - I wanted to grab the main female character and yell at her not to be so stupid. This is a sign of good writing in this case, because she's meant to be ignorant and misguided - but it was still a little hard to read at times for this reason.
April 20, 2008
Here's my review of sorts:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/...
http://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/...
June 17, 2012
I'll read the trilogy, I think. I'm interested in this antagonist.
October 11, 2018
It’s not often that a book has a note on the front to explain that it is in-fact a whole novel but ‘The West Pier’ did. I’m not sure it needed it, the main story itself was thorough and satisfying, although there was something about it that made it feel a little like backstory or preamble.
‘The West Pier’ is the first novel in the Gorse Trilogy, intended to be the Gorse Quadrilogy but cut short by alcoholism and death. There are plenty of clues (and outright statements) about the proposed trajectory of the books. In each, Gorse is going to embark on riskier plans to humiliate and defraud women and presumably end up caught and hanged. This first book tells of his childhood and first big con.
There’s nothing in the childhood that explains Gorse’s unfeeling behaviour, we meet him at the age of ten with a cold, calculating indifference to other people and a fondness for trickery and manipulation. We are told he quite enjoys mindless army drills and has a fondness for uniforms, implying tendencies towards fascism. It’s also interesting to note that the first ‘trick’ played was by putting one boy’s prize torch into another’s jacket and claiming he stole it - the victim being Jewish.
More disturbing is the incident where he lures a young girl down to a shed, ties her up and takes her money. There are hints about his fondness for tying people up - something that may be developed in other books. Certainly he likes to make women feel silly (and take their money into the bargain).
We then meet him, Ryan and Bell walking along the West Pier of Brighton. Only one of them still lives there but the other two have independently decided to go on holiday before settling down into adult life, they’re eighteen. On the pier they meet pretty Esther and Gertrude, ‘the other one’. There’s a lot of fun with the politics of dating, the complications of having two women for three men and the unfairness that ‘other ones’ always end up together. They banter and chat and sound like utter tits, but the rivalry between Ryan and Gorse is set up. Ryan really has set his eyes on pretty Esther, Gorse has set his eyes on manipulation.
The rest of the book follows Gorse’s efforts to break any fledgling Ryan-Esther couple up and to bag all of Esther’s life-savings and self-worth to boot. On the page, he’s most dislikable when he is most trying to be charming, speaking in the faux-olde-fashioned dialogue favoured by Mr Thwaites in ‘The Slaves of Solitude’ and playing ‘silly ass’ with his monocle.
Of course Gorse gets all of his own way, in painful and pathetic detail. Much like Bob in ‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Stars’, you wanted to shout through the page at Esther and tell her she’s being a fool.
The book was a little repetitive, Gorse’s main move to impress was to get her drunk on gin in the Metropole hotel. Indeed, their dates started to sound incredibly tedious, almost as tedious as the dates that Ryan tries to take with her. The most interesting aspect of the book were the times when Gorse slips up and goes to far, the narrator intruding in and warning us that this is a feature of the otherwise meticulous Gorse’s dealings.
I didn’t find the tragedy as strong as in other Hamilton books, and I didn’t find Gorse a likeable enough bastard to be on his side but I’m led to believe the second book plays more for comedy, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. Being Patrick Hamilton, it’ll be cringe comedy, he does love his monsters.
Worth a read, but not if you haven’t already read ‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Stars’, ‘The Slaves of Solitude’ or ‘Hangover Square’.
‘The West Pier’ is the first novel in the Gorse Trilogy, intended to be the Gorse Quadrilogy but cut short by alcoholism and death. There are plenty of clues (and outright statements) about the proposed trajectory of the books. In each, Gorse is going to embark on riskier plans to humiliate and defraud women and presumably end up caught and hanged. This first book tells of his childhood and first big con.
There’s nothing in the childhood that explains Gorse’s unfeeling behaviour, we meet him at the age of ten with a cold, calculating indifference to other people and a fondness for trickery and manipulation. We are told he quite enjoys mindless army drills and has a fondness for uniforms, implying tendencies towards fascism. It’s also interesting to note that the first ‘trick’ played was by putting one boy’s prize torch into another’s jacket and claiming he stole it - the victim being Jewish.
More disturbing is the incident where he lures a young girl down to a shed, ties her up and takes her money. There are hints about his fondness for tying people up - something that may be developed in other books. Certainly he likes to make women feel silly (and take their money into the bargain).
We then meet him, Ryan and Bell walking along the West Pier of Brighton. Only one of them still lives there but the other two have independently decided to go on holiday before settling down into adult life, they’re eighteen. On the pier they meet pretty Esther and Gertrude, ‘the other one’. There’s a lot of fun with the politics of dating, the complications of having two women for three men and the unfairness that ‘other ones’ always end up together. They banter and chat and sound like utter tits, but the rivalry between Ryan and Gorse is set up. Ryan really has set his eyes on pretty Esther, Gorse has set his eyes on manipulation.
The rest of the book follows Gorse’s efforts to break any fledgling Ryan-Esther couple up and to bag all of Esther’s life-savings and self-worth to boot. On the page, he’s most dislikable when he is most trying to be charming, speaking in the faux-olde-fashioned dialogue favoured by Mr Thwaites in ‘The Slaves of Solitude’ and playing ‘silly ass’ with his monocle.
Of course Gorse gets all of his own way, in painful and pathetic detail. Much like Bob in ‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Stars’, you wanted to shout through the page at Esther and tell her she’s being a fool.
The book was a little repetitive, Gorse’s main move to impress was to get her drunk on gin in the Metropole hotel. Indeed, their dates started to sound incredibly tedious, almost as tedious as the dates that Ryan tries to take with her. The most interesting aspect of the book were the times when Gorse slips up and goes to far, the narrator intruding in and warning us that this is a feature of the otherwise meticulous Gorse’s dealings.
I didn’t find the tragedy as strong as in other Hamilton books, and I didn’t find Gorse a likeable enough bastard to be on his side but I’m led to believe the second book plays more for comedy, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. Being Patrick Hamilton, it’ll be cringe comedy, he does love his monsters.
Worth a read, but not if you haven’t already read ‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Stars’, ‘The Slaves of Solitude’ or ‘Hangover Square’.
March 22, 2024
Story of a lifelong scoundrel - from his sly antics at school, to his heartless treatment later in life of a naïve young woman.
First of the three novels which make up The Gorse Trilogy, The West Pier is another fine character novel from Patrick Hamilton. We’re immediately pulled in to the narrative by the grippingly told opening school story - in which we discover the true character of the inherently nasty, scheming Ernest Ralph Gorse, and then follow his insidious progression through a life of compulsive lying and calculating treachery. The novel doesn’t let up.
I have found many of Hamilton’s previous novels to be as close to perfection as I could hope for, but despite the joy and readability of The West Pier, I do have some minor quibbles. I am not a fan of characters withholding information from others as a plot device - especially when it goes past the point of being logical; unfortunately there is a great deal of it on display here. When lack of knowledge leads to lack of resolution, I get irritated! And the irritation isn’t helped by the all too quick and unsatisfying curtailing of the book’s many threads.
I don’t want to carp on too much about what I didn’t like - for this is a very enjoyable read, indeed the best novel I've read since July last year!
First of the three novels which make up The Gorse Trilogy, The West Pier is another fine character novel from Patrick Hamilton. We’re immediately pulled in to the narrative by the grippingly told opening school story - in which we discover the true character of the inherently nasty, scheming Ernest Ralph Gorse, and then follow his insidious progression through a life of compulsive lying and calculating treachery. The novel doesn’t let up.
I have found many of Hamilton’s previous novels to be as close to perfection as I could hope for, but despite the joy and readability of The West Pier, I do have some minor quibbles. I am not a fan of characters withholding information from others as a plot device - especially when it goes past the point of being logical; unfortunately there is a great deal of it on display here. When lack of knowledge leads to lack of resolution, I get irritated! And the irritation isn’t helped by the all too quick and unsatisfying curtailing of the book’s many threads.
I don’t want to carp on too much about what I didn’t like - for this is a very enjoyable read, indeed the best novel I've read since July last year!
June 4, 2023
One sees here Hamilton's usual strengths: a gift for precisely describing (and often skewering) English society, and a similar ability to create very believable dialogue. But I found it difficult to read at length about Ernest Ralph Gorse, a man with no scruples and to dread what bad things he would do to someone next. This balanced with an interesting description of social interaction between the sexes in 1920's England, and the fun offered by Brighton at that time.
I also found this a slow read, and very short of action. Meticulous reproduction of realistic dialogue got wearing. It also seemed to me that Esther talked like a much older woman than her teen-age years, and somehow she reminded me of Edith Bunker in the long-ago TV series, not for her social views but for her lack of good sense.
My recommendation, if you are drawn to the trilogy, is to skip this first book because it is summarized in a couple of pages in "Mt. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse," the next novel in the series.
I also found this a slow read, and very short of action. Meticulous reproduction of realistic dialogue got wearing. It also seemed to me that Esther talked like a much older woman than her teen-age years, and somehow she reminded me of Edith Bunker in the long-ago TV series, not for her social views but for her lack of good sense.
My recommendation, if you are drawn to the trilogy, is to skip this first book because it is summarized in a couple of pages in "Mt. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse," the next novel in the series.
February 26, 2023
I read this immediately after Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and there are strong parallels - Pinkie and Gorse, Rose and Esther, Ida and Gorse's stepmother. Hamilton however moves everyone up a class - from lower to middle class, and, the girls, from slum abjection to shopgirl. Unlike Pinkie, Gorse is a true sadist, in that he derives pleasure from it, and at times plots his torment purely for the pleasure in exercising his talent. As ever with Hamilton, there are no real friendships or intimacies between people, and you get the sense that Hamilton dislikes his characters. The flash-forwards where we get a glimpse of their later lives seem gratuitously cruel. All that said, the writing is suberb - the awkward manoeuvering between gormless boys and girls is brilliantly observed.
April 29, 2025
Patrick Hamilton does it to me every time. By this point in his life he is bitter and drunk, and after 100 pages I wondered how much I cared about this tiny story and these wretched characters, but as ever I got drawn in, and by the finish I was head in hands at the way Gorse manipulated his stooges.
June 8, 2020
Brilliantly crafted and cruel "sting" with a strong evocation of time and place. The brass neck of our anti-hero encourages me to read more of his stories.
April 2, 2021
My third Patrick Hamilton book, all excellent. Look forward to the remainder of the Gorse trilogy. My favorite book by this author, so far, is Slaves of Solitude, for whatever that is worth.
July 2, 2021
As a placeholder - lovely psychological drama but I found it sagged a lot in the middle. Masterful start and end.
August 20, 2019
Patrick Hamilton is probably best remembered today, if he is remembered at all, as the writer of Rope (filmed memorably by Hitchcock) and Gaslight (which gave us the term "gaslighting", also thanks to a memorable film). His 1930s novel Hangover Square was a bit of a cult in my first year at university but I hadn't read any of his stuff for going on 40 years. This is the first in his final "Gorse" trilogy, written in the fifties but set pre and immediately post the First World War and starring, if that's the word, Ernest Ralph Gorse, one of the most repulsive characters in all fiction. We begin with Gorse The Boy, framing a fellow-pupil for theft for no other motive than pure devilry, then fast forward to Gorse as a young knut who sets about seducing and robbing an innocent young working-class girl.
This is, I suppose, not much more than an interesting curio, but there is something so horrifically entertaining about Gorse's villainy, and it's written with such brio and charm that I'm giving it 4 stars and am eager to press on with the rest of the trilogy.
This is, I suppose, not much more than an interesting curio, but there is something so horrifically entertaining about Gorse's villainy, and it's written with such brio and charm that I'm giving it 4 stars and am eager to press on with the rest of the trilogy.
May 9, 2020
The West Pier is a curious and strange read. Ernest Ralph Gorse, the protagonist, is a Ripley-esque character, for want of a better term, but the real problem is that he is completely unlikable which is detrimental to the overall story. Nowadays the class aspect of the novel seems dated and awkward, says he who doesn’t live in England. The West Pier is the first book in a series of three but I don’t see myself reading the remaining two books.
October 14, 2025
I'm a huge Hamilton fan, and have been working my way through all his books in the order he wrote them. I found this one entertaining and illuminating of the ways of normal people with normal lives, like all of H's books, but it felt a bit limited by Gorse's one-dimensional character and the lack of uncertainty about the outcome.
March 29, 2017
Fascinating but disturbing dissection of a man without conscience. I felt I needed a long hot shower and maybe some cuddling with a kitten when it was over.
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