The Sailor in the Wardrobe by Hugo Hamilton

Terry Eagleton



The Guardian, Saturday 4 February 2006

The Sailor in the Wardrobe 

by Hugo Hamilton

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history. Gothic's fascination with ruins and ancient crimes, spying priests and bloodstained histories, is tailor-made for the place. The past in Ireland refuses a decent burial; instead, it preys on the living in the monstrous form of the undead. The author of the greatest book of the undead, Dracula, was a Dublin civil servant. For all their hard-headedness, the Protestant ascendency which governed Ireland for two centuries were a remarkably spooky bunch, as WB Yeats's dabbling in ghouls and demons bears witness. James Joyce's hero Stephen Dedalus declares that he is trying to awake from the nightmare of history; but the worst nightmare of all is to think you have woken up only to find that you haven't. We have seen several examples of such false awakening in Northern Ireland over the past few decades.

Hugo Hamilton's first memoir, The Speckled People, was all about festering secrets and guilt-ridden histories. The child Hugo imagines the dead whispering ceaselessly in their graves, holding sway over the living. His father is a heavy-handed Irish chauvinist who forbids his children to speak English in the house. Full of Micawberish schemes and crackpot commercial projects, he insists on doing business only with clients who call him by the Irish version of his surname, which unfortunately for his bank balance is O hUrmoltaigh. Hamilton's mother is German, a refugee from the collapse of the Third Reich, and teaches her language and history to her children.

Just as Ireland itself passed from Irish to English in the 19th century, so the fork-tongued Hugo is adrift between languages, bereft of a home or history to call his own. He is both far too Irish and far too little so for the comfort of postwar Dublin. As a child, he becomes a repository of bitter historical memories without even knowing it, a receptacle for the stored-up animosity of centuries. As a German he is an aggressor, and as Irish he is a victim. Children in the street call him Nazi and Jew-burner, while his father seeks to brand him with a more Gaelic kind of anti-Britishness. The book is all about the violence of voices, being trapped inside names and tongues or being exiled from them. Like a lot of Irish literature, its secret protagonist is language itself. In a boldly symbolic moment, the family even chew at dinner on the leathery tongue of an ox.

What The Speckled People uses to counter this verbal violence is its own literary style. It is written in the wide-eyed idiom of a child, one of the few kinds of language in the book which is not out to maim or manipulate. The Sailor in the Wardrobe, Hamilton's latest memoir, is couched in a more streetwise style, though still with an aura of innocence about it. We have moved on from the 1950s to the 60s, and from the author's childhood to his adolescence. Otherwise, not much seems to have changed. Progress can be measured by the fact that the local kids now call him Eichmann rather than Hitler. Hamilton senior is still dreaming of an Irish-speaking Ireland. His wife is still plagued by the horrors she endured in Hitler's Germany. There is an air of déjà vu about the book, as though the best-selling formula of the first memoir is being rolled out again. Even the cover is similar.

Yet this new memoir is more than just a Return of the Speckled People. It is an enchanting piece of work in its own right, and the fact that not much has changed is part of the point. Young Hugo has discovered a temporary escape from the problems of culture in nature, working with boats in a Dublin harbour. He dreams of shedding his identity, giving history the slip, becoming a kind of Beckettian "nobody". He had, as he says, no story for himself, since narratives are acts of violence. In a desperate moment of self-annihilation, he tries to "unremember" Germany, his family and his childhood. In one magnificent scene, he tells his father that it is ignorance he desires, not knowledge, and the outraged patriarch throws a bowl of stewed apples at his head. As in Eden, knowledge is dangerous, divisive stuff, and Hugo prefers to have apples tipped over his head than to bite on them.

But the present keeps evoking traumatic images of the past, and even among the fishing boats a sectarian history intervenes. You can smell the resentment on the pier between Dan, the Catholic from Derry, and Tyrone, the Protestant from Belfast. The Speckled People set a family's private troubles against the political background of the Irish struggle for independence and the second world war. Here, a decade or so on, the Northern Irish troubles, Vietnam and Martin Luther King are beautifully interwoven with Hugo's part-poignant, part-farcical rebellion against his own local tyrants. He longs to kill his father, but knows that the self-hatred this will sow in him will perpetuate a history of brutality rather than abolish it. Rather like Ireland itself, the book is full of an explosive hatred laced with a deep hunger for peace. Besides, the boy's rebelliousness imitates that of his mother, who was a silent protester against the Nazis. His refusal to serve thus binds him to the deathly lineage he seeks to overcome. Nothing is more typical of modern Irish history than wanting to break free of it.

The family in Ireland has often been a microcosm of history, rather than (as usually in England) a shelter from it. For centuries, the typical Irish family was the farm, which linked the domestic, the economic and (given rural militancy) the political. True to this inheritance, Hamilton has an intuitive flair for spotting connections between personal and public worlds. The boys at his school, enraged by a bullying teacher and inspired by the street-fighting in Belfast, rise up in mass rebellion.

When it comes to its turbulent history, today's Ireland is caught between nostalgia and amnesia, a surfeit of belief and a shortage of it. There are old-style nationalists like Hamilton père, who dream of the future rebirth of a past nation that never existed. And there are cool, postmodern sceptics who throw up in disgust at the very mention of the great famine or Easter 1916. Each camp is the inverted mirror-image of the other. Repressing your history is as much a way of not handling it as wallowing morbidly in it. It is deeply to Hamilton's credit that his writing refuses both of these false solutions. If his father is portrayed as a terrifying figure, he is also a tragic one. For all his chauvinist fantasies, he condemns the IRA, comes to confess some of his past mistakes, and is a moderniser in his own eccentric style. He even ends up committing the unforgivable sin of speaking English in a soft Cork accent.

As for Hamilton fils, he must resolve his Oedipal ambivalence to his father, whom he detests with a tender love, just as he must resolve the conundrum that history can be neither accepted nor ignored. Instead, it can be conquered only by being confronted. Memory can be an act of redemption as well as a force for oppression; by remembering the dead, the boy reflects, you can help to keep them alive. Fascism, by contrast, seeks to annihilate those it slaughters twice over, erasing them from the historical record. The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it. In confessing his own mistakes, Hugo's father sets him free to make his own. Just as his mother worked for the German de-Nazification courts, which sought to stare historical horrors in the face, so at the end of the book the son makes his pilgrimage to Berlin, home of some of his nightmares. He settles there for a while, still speckled or hybrid, still a displaced person, yet wise enough not to exchange the myth of a motherland for the myth of the unattached self. He is now free to become whatever he wishes; yet in coming to Berlin, he is also assuming his German grandfather's identity, giving him back his name and life. In recounting how he grew up with no story to tell, Hamilton has found his story.

· Terry Eagleton's book Holy Terror is published by Oxford University Press.