Opening Lines
The novel opens on a metaphor. Actually it opens on an example of onomatopoeia: “Click.” Then it goes on to question whether that is right or not; maybe it is more like a “snap” or a “crack.” Whatever the sound it is, the reader should be aware that it will be prove quite significant because a writer doesn’t waste an opening line on a sound that isn’t. Especially when the sound is:
“a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise. It was the sound which a noise makes when it abruptly ceases: it had a temporarily deafening effect. It was as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead.”
Dead Moods
The meaning behind the sound—now it is almost certainly best described as a snap rather than a click—is very short made clear and the significance of the sound is very forthrightly made explicit as something of tremendous importance. Not the kind of thing you just ignore and hope will go away:
“`Dead’ moods – yes, all his life he had had ‘dead’ moods, but in those days he had slowly slipped into and out of them – they had not been so frequent, so sudden, so dead, so completely dividing him from his other life. They did not arrive with this extraordinary `snap.’”
Captured in the Netta
Up to a certain point, Hangover Square almost has the feel of a film noir story, though with rather obvious limitations placed upon that particular interpretation. One very essential quality the novel shares with that cinematic genre, however, is the femme fatale. Indeed, the femme in this case is one fo the most fatale to show up in the literature of its time:
“This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purpose.”
The Screams of Laughter
It’s kind of weird, when you think about it, how often a round of intense, prolonged laughter shared by a small (or even large) group of people can become the one singular moment in time that sparks gruesome violence. Laugh loudest at the wrong person at precisely the wrong time it is a guarantee of also laughing last. The moment is arriving for the man with snapping sound in his head:
“It was like the world’s laugh in his face, Netta’s laugh, the last laugh of everybody at his failure and isolation, his banishment from the world of virile people who were happy and made love and had friends.”
The Dead Zone
When the snap comes and the dead mood engulfs him, the man whom they laughed is gone. He has traveled out of their dimension and into his own; a state of being he compares to watching a truly silent movie with no sound effects, no music, nothing. Just movement and silence during which time:
“He looked at passing objects and people, but they had no colour, vivacity, meaning – he was mentally deaf to them. They moved like automatons, without motive, without volition of their own.”
