"For two weeks now. I have been thinking. In the beginning I thought it was only in my mind but now I think I am right. I think Evelyn is falling in love with you.
Werner, a reasonable German, is sitting between his wife and the Irishman with whom he thinks she is about to have an affair. The Irishman is gob smacked. Werner continues:
"I have spoken to Evelyn about this. It is true. She has also agreed that something is happening to her. Frank... I don't want to make an accusation against you. I am not angry with you. But I think I must talk to you about this openly."
This rich comedy comes from The Compound Assembly of E. Richter, a story from Hugo Hamilton's first book of short stories, Dublin Where The Palm Trees Grow, which is published next week. Its deliciousness comes partly from the blatant cultural difference between the Irishman and the German, the clash between oblique and straight lines of communication.
The blurb on the dust jacket of the new book seems to attempt a racial analysis of this half German, half Irish writer's style, describing the stories as "cutting an Irish sense of crisis and tragicomedy with a German sense of irony and realism... " Hamilton agrees this is going too far, but still argues that the cultural polarities between which he grew up have wrought his need to write, his way of writing and what he writes about. Werner's show down with Frank and Evelyn in the restaurant, could, he says, quite easily happen in Germany.
"A couple might say: `We're splitting up, would you mind talking to us about it?' In general, my characters are unable to talk, but I come from the German tradition where everything is talked out to the very end."
Brought up in south Dublin speaking German to his mother and Irish to his father, he learned English at school and on the sheets. He says he stiffles assistance between himself and the language in which he writes: "I find myself having to be conscious of everything." He came to writing, he says, to find a language of his own.
This heightened consciousness of language has affected the way he perceives relationships, he says, and hence the characters he draws in his fiction: "My characters have a problem with language. They are stuck in metaphysical crises which they can't get out of by talk - either in Irish, English or German."
The stories were written about 10 years ago, at the beginning of a streak of writing which has produced three novels, Surrogate City (1990) The Last Shot (1991), and The Love Test (1995). Hamilton describes Mad Dog as the story which launched him into writing, and an excellent example of the wordless crises typical of his work. Squeezing his words as precisely as ever from the tubes he says feel strange in his hands he describes the creation of a powerful romance between two office workers, Liz and Maurice. The love is not something which happens to them, they build it with all the imagination they have, driving along the Atlantic coast in a clapped out, borrowed van, where at night they fall into a "capsule of scented sleep": "By afternoon they were ready to forsake that bleak spot in the middle of nowhere which they had made so important in their sleep. An unmarked shrine of evaporated love by the roadside."
THERE comes a time when their imagination dries up, however, when they can't think of anywhere new to have lunch and they have no money, and so he persuades her to do a "runner": "It's the kind of crisis which all couples come to. He asks her to lie and to steal. All of my characters come to a point where they look into each other's eyes and then say: That's what our life has been reduced to - and they end up doing something like running out of a restaurant."
"Most American stories end with people driving off in a car to a new beginning", he says. "I'm not so impressed by that." He explains that he was experimenting with form in these early stories, and found out that "the story", the beginning, middle and end corks the best: "But I've got a different way of thinking about the end of the story. I think of the predicament as the end. I leave the characters in crises.
"Crisis" is a word of which he is and. His use of the condition makes him a natural short story writer because short stories, as Frank O'Connor noted, tend to hinge on a moment of illumination: "What happens in my fiction generally is that people get this wider vision and it knocks them out", he explains. "My vision of the world is to do well on that moment, the chink."
He says that he, like his characters, is "not verbal", but seems quite relaxed and even anxious to talk about his work - the distress of the people who live in his fiction, he describes almost with surprise: "They want to be in relationships, they have desires, but they are troubled." Fittingly, he uses a term from visual art, "collage", to talk about another story, Goodbye To The Hurt Mind, which focuses on what he calls "cerebral pain". A series of scenes paint a picture of absolute imaginative and emotional redundancy in this country. The characters can only see getting out of a plane in sunny Sydney with a condom on as an escape hatch, while violence rumbles hideously on: "Even the wine looked black in the glasses; black as H block flags or black plastic bags. And candles seemed to give everyone such pale fleshtones, like degraded election posters gone pale with age.
"I don't think I'll ever get away from the sense of my characters being haunted by the political landscape they live in", he says. In his novels set in Germany, where he lived for three years, the trauma of recent history runs like indelible ink through the lives of his characters; in The Last Shot, a father kills his sick, Down's Syndrome child, producing a horrible echo of Nazi extermination; in The Love Test, a Western couple spy on each other, just as the East German authorities spied on the love making of the husband's mistress.
LIKE the Irish characters, abroad in his fiction, he could play up being Irish in Germany - "I had a tin whistle and it was like having a gold credit card or membership of Lillie's Bordello" - because Irish nationalism has "charming" forms "Ireland has a clean slate, in terms of its past. German nationalism is tainted. Though it's really only the Peace Process, which allows us . . . You could just about sing The Fields of Athenry now."
Although he has of late been travelling in Eastern Europe, he is in Dublin (his oldest child is going to college), and has just finished a novel set here. But he emphasises that fiction is formed as mysteriously as personality, and he hasn't sewed in social or political elements, like the fact that "my Granny used to hide sweets in the Civil War bullet holes in the creamery."
The idea that: "Fiction is something you can't hide in, it's more truthful than other things", is one he dresses in new words again and again: "All my writing", he repeats, "is a way of explaining myself to myself."
