Hanley, James
Entry updated 3 February 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1897-1985) Irish author, in the UK from around 1908, whose prolific output – beginning with Drift (1930) – focused on raw tales of life at sea, and upon sometimes grim novels about working-class life in Britain, a savagery of address almost certainly effected in part through his long immersion in World War One; he enlisted early, was gassed and invalidated out of the army, and returned to war work as a stoker on ships carrying troops. Boy (1932), about sexual violence inflicted on the young at sea, was successfully prosecuted for obscenity; the truth of his portrait was not questioned. E M Forster vigorously defended the novel in his "Liberty in England" (delivered 1935; in Abinger Harvest coll 1936). Hanley's only sf, What Farrar Saw (1946; rev as coll, vt What Farrar Saw and Other Stories 1984), set in a Near-Future war-depleted Britain, presents a country choked by both an invidious class system and a sudden, convulsive, nation-wide traffic jam, which serves not only as a surreally intense metaphor for social sclerosis, but as a proleptic dream-dense vision of the future of petroleum-based road Transportation after World War Two. Though the tale is told without those lines of perspectival cognition typical of most speculative fiction, it is clearly consistent with the ironized views of the future typical of the Scientific Romance: a vision not shared by American Genre SF of the time, where typically the consequences of the triumph of the car are not addressed. In What Farrar Saw the immediate jam is cleared with bombs, and the novel ends in the "drone of planes". [JC]
James Joseph Hanley
born Liverpool, England: 3 September 1897
died London: 11 November 1985
works (highly selected)
- What Farrar Saw (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1946) [hb/Enid Marx]
- What Farrar Saw and Other Stories (London: André Deutsch, 1984) [exp of the above as coll: vt: hb/Meena Jamil]
links
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