Memoir: Hugo Hamilton has a talent for voice. In his previous memoir, The Speckled People, we got his child voice flawlessly reproduced.
Now, in the sequel, The Sailor in the Wardrobe, we hear his adolescent voice. He is gabby, joyful, fuming, vengeful, forgiving, furious and a bit weird. He's got insight and he's solipsistic. His grammar is capricious. He shifts with horrible abruptness between time, place and character. He withholds privileged information. He has the irritating habit of telling you about a book, say, but omitting its title. As ventriloquism, this is just about as good as it gets and I never once doubted I was with a 16-year-old boy.
The subject of memoirs, mostly, is the family, and as we all come from families of some sort we love to read about others growing up in that always half-nourishing, half-destroying unit. In families it is usually the parents who loom largest, and that's certainly the case here. In the Hamilton household they were the sun and moon about which the Hamilton children orbited.
Of the two, Mrs Hamilton was the attractive one. I liked her already from The Speckled People and I like her even more now. In the previous instalment we were only told about her suffering in Germany during the war. In this book we get her post-war story, which in some ways was worse.
Because her record was unblemished by association with National Socialism, she got work with the Allies. First, she minded the children of an American officer, and stole his food to feed every hungry person she knew.
One of the families she helped gave her a very valuable early book printed at Gutenberg, and their request years later for their gift's return provides a wonderful narrative thread binding her life in post-war Germany and Dublin in the 1970s.
When the American officer and his family went home (they wanted to take her with them to Vermont, but she declined), Mrs Hamilton became a stenographer in a denazification court. Everything went swimmingly until the court prosecutor told her to change a Jewish woman's testimony in order to convict a Frankfurt gynaecologist as a Nazi. She wouldn't. She resigned her job (which entailed the loss of food, accommodation and transport, a considerable sacrifice in post-war Germany) and wrote a letter explaining why she wouldn't lie.
It was a dangerous thing to do, as she discovered. The authorities pressured her to stay and the court prosecutor tried to force her to withdraw her letter. She realised he was an ex-Nazi who believed zealous Nazi-hunting was the best protection going. But knowing this was no defence against the threats he issued. In the end, she got so frightened she fled to Ireland, where she met her husband.
The man she married was an engineer, a passionate Irish nationalist and an obsessive Gaelic speaker who couldn't accept that his father had served in the Royal Navy. (His was the photograph hidden in a wardrobe in the Hamilton home from which the book's title comes.) Prior to marriage, the author's father was secretary of the Aiseirí party, the aim of which was an Irish-speaking 32-county Ireland. After Aiserí split over the issue of violence in the North (Hamilton senior was a peacenik, which was at odds with how violent he was domestically), he decided to create, inside his home, at whatever cost, the paradise he believed should exist in Ireland at large, where only Irish (or German) was spoken and English was banned. He enforced this regime with extreme violence.
The Speckled People largely told the story of the author's ghastly childhood with this monster and it had a tight focus on the home. In The Sailor in the Wardrobe, though Hamilton senior's raging tyranny remains the book's radioactive core, the focus broadens out. Hugo is older, he's moving away from home and into the world. We follow him on holidays he had in Ireland as a teenager, to his first job (where he was witness to a sectarian vendetta between two Northern fishermen), to outings with visiting German relations, to his hilarious experiences in an English pea-canning factory.
This shift of emphasis away from home is one big difference between this memoir and its predecessor, but the other, much more interesting departure, is Hamilton's attitude to his father. Though he's still a despot who embodies everything that's hateful about the Irish-speaking, English-and-England-hating republican project, the son now sees little streaks of good in him. This isn't a symptom of softening, however, but of something much more interesting.
Our relationship to the past is not static. Hamilton now is several years on from where he was when he wrote The Speckled People, so obviously he sees his father slightly differently. Less skilful, more deceitful memoir writers hate this kind of slippage, and you can see why - it leads to readers asking all sorts of awkward questions about the veracity of a version. But Hugo Hamilton is a mature writer who knows that keeping nuance and new insights out is the work of a propagandist, while letting them in is the mark of an artist. So he lets them in.
The result is that an already complex portrait of his father has become richer, deeper and sadder than in the previous book (seeing his father's human moments makes his violence all the worse), and that is quite an achievement.
Carlo Gébler is the Arts Council Writing Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. His books, The Siege of Derry and The Bull Raid, a new version of the Tain, will both be published in paperback later this year
The Sailor in the Wardrobe Hugo Hamilton Fourth Estate, 263pp. £15.99