Cosmo Hamilton (1870–1942)

This novel is not a look back at London's society in the 1920s- it's a vividly drawn picture from London society of the 1920s. Thus, it's a bit like watching a brilliantly done 1920s film. You, dear reader, are transported back to another time by an astute, accomplished and, in his own day, very well-known novelist with dozens of hits to his credit: novels, stage plays, and film-scripts which made him a literary celebrity and all-around socialite and man-about-town, a fellow who knew and show more was known by the social elite but wasn't defined or confined by them. He was, clearly, from the artful skills on display in this novel, a fine connaisseur of human nature as well as a fiction writer of the first rank. His work easily ranks with that of Scott Fitzgerald--who he surely must have known personally. But enough about this author of whom you've likely never heard and on to a sketch of the plot.

She is young--about eighteen or nineteen--and breathtakingly beautiful and her parents' only child. Father, John Breezy, is a watch-maker and jeweller with a small shop in Queen's Road, Bayswater, founded six generations earlier by Armand de Brézé in 1760 and passed down to the present from father to son. The much reserved and doting mother, Mrs. Breezy, works in the jewellery shop and frets and worries over her aforementioned daughter, Lola. While her parents are the picture of middle-class shop-owning conventionality, Lola is anything but that. Lola has no intentions of sticking within the narrow lines of her social station's prescribed prospects--marriage, motherhood and homemaking alongside a man of her class with similarly constrained prospects. Lola is determined to make her way in and her mark on London's higher society and she is going to enlist her aunt, Miss Breezy, her father's sister, to help her. Miss Breezy, it so happens, is the head of housekeeping in the home of one Right Honourable Arthur Napier Fallaray, present Home Secretary in the coalition government and iconoclastic leader in his party. Every Thursday, Miss Breezy comes to call at her brother's shop and delivers the week's news from the insider's view at the Fallaray household. From this decades long habit, Lola has drawn, formed from childhood, an intimate idea of Arthur Fallaray, the man who, though not terribly happily married, has come to occupy a privileged place in Lola's young but very determined heart.

The scene opens when the narrator, a worldly wise playwright and screen writer, spies gorgeous Lola aboard his double-decker omnibus and, enraptured, decides to get off where she alights to follow her, watching as he does her effect on the passers-by.

A novel in which to savour the life and feeling of a time now lost to us though, in its human nature, fully near and familiar in so many ways.

Some favorite lines from the book:

" Don't let's go into a fuggy building!"

"I'm awfully afraid that something must have happened. Can I be of use to you?" "I'm longing for asparagus," said Lola in the manner of an old friend. (p.98);

"It was one of those nights which come sometimes in April and touch the city with magic. ...The sky was clear and almost Italian, and the moon lay like snow on the roofs." (p.107);

"To add to the conglomeration of absurdities the whole place reeked with burning josh sticks. A woman who dyes her hair a brilliant yellow invariably burns something on the altar of renewed optimism." (p.115);

"Fate has swept the pavement for me. ... I shall not make any slip." (p.123);

(128);(129-131);(143-144); (189); show less

Young girl escapes from a difficult home life by getting married to a decent fellow who's genuinely in love with her. But she doesn't really want to be married and uses her new situation as a springboard for wild behavior and childishness. Doesn't realize what a good thing she has until she starts to drive her husband away with her flippancy. Ends okay, but too much immaturity along the way.

"Into the Blue Room thou shalt not look" By COSMO HAMILTON
In this powerful new novel the author of "Scandal" endeavors to show the after-effects of the war on the souls of two men of diametrically opposite temperaments and upbringing. "The Blue Room" is sure to be one of the most widely discussed books of the year. - 1920 advertisement in The Outlook