By Trevor Butterworth

Published in The Washington Post
June 8, 2003Who do we believe?

THE SPECKLED PEOPLE
A Memoir of A Half-Irish Childhood
By Hugo Hamilton

One could be forgiven for greeting the appearance of a new Irish memoir with the pitiless ennui of Dorothy Parker: "What fresh hell is this?" The index of misery in this popular genre is already well thumbed and all too deeply plumbed. So it is with immense relief to report that while Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People contains sufficient anguish to summon up the McCourts and Nuala O'Faolain (should they be your poison), it has a far greater power to enchant.

Indeed, Hamilton's return to childhood calls more to mind L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between, in which Leo Colston's narrative voice is steeped in the foreknowledge of later remembrance. And just as Hartley famously described the past as a foreign country, in Hamilton's telling the past is several foreign countries, none of which is home.

The dissonance begins in his parentage. Hamilton's mother, Irmgard Kaiser, is a refugee from the wreck of Germany, drawn to Ireland by the hope that romance may still flourish on the very edge of Europe. And sure enough in does, in the striking presence of Sean O[acute] hUrmoltaigh (Jack Hamilton), a Germanophile and an ardent cultural nationalist committed to recreating the conscience of his race in its ancestral tongue.

As this improbable couple raises a family in an insular, conservative society, the melding of cultures marks the four children as breac or "speckled," like trout or barm brack raisin bread, half-Irish and half-German.

To the other neighborhood children, this means, naturally enough, that the Hamiltons are Nazis. "I see them looking at us," recalls Hugo, "waiting for the day that we're alone and there's nobody around. I know they're going to execute me, because they call my older brother Hitler, and I get the name of an SS man who was found in Argentina and brought back to be put on trial for all the people he killed."

But the trial they will really face is as Irish speakers in an English-speaking world, forbidden to let English cross their lips or even enter their thoughts. "My father wants all the Irish people to cross back over into the Irish language so he made a rule that we can't speak English, because your home is your language and he wants us to be Irish and not British. . . . We can speak Irish or German, but English is like a foreign country outside the door."

As with all banned substances, it is alluring and dangerous. One afternoon, Franz, Hugo's older brother, lingers on the edge of a street game of Cowboys and Indians. He imagines that his scooter is a horse and that he has a gun tucked into his lederhosen. Suddenly, his father, coming home from work, turns the corner and catches sight of the child's longing to belong. "Franz . . . tried to scoot back to the house as fast as he could, but it was already too late. I heard the key in the door and I saw Franz coming in with nothing to say. I saw my father turning to look at the boys on the street before he closed the door and put his briefcase down. My mother came to kiss him, but that didn't stop him saying that Franz had to be punished for pretending to be with the other boys on the street. 'Now why is that?' my mother asked. 'He was listening to them in English,' my father said. 'My God,' she said. 'Are you not taking this too far?' My father shook his head."

While all the Hamilton children are brutally punished for bringing English words into the home, Franz suffers the most. Earlier, the impulse to sing "walk on wall" over and over again as he walked on the garden wall invited a slap from his father that sent him tumbling to a broken nose. This time, Irmgard begs Sean to forswear violence, and succeeds. He satisfies his lost cause by confiscating Franz's "horse," and it goes upstairs to sit beside Hugo's, taken after he was caught listening to English songs on the radio.

As the children move in ever-decreasing circles -- as more and more of the world outside becomes verboten -- they delve into the mysteries of their parents' past for some explanation. And as when mist clears from a valley, the depths of grief are slowly and softly revealed.

None is more searing than the slow realization that their mother's reason for fleeing Germany has led her to a man whose fanaticism draws from the same well as Nazism. This finally becomes explicit when they find a yellowed clipping with their father's byline from an Irish-language newspaper. The date is 1946. The headline is "Ireland's Jewish Problem."

"When you're small," writes Hamilton, "you know nothing and when you grow up there are things that you don't want to know. I don't want anyone to know that my father wanted Jewish people in Ireland to speak Irish and do Irish dancing like everyone else. I don't want people to know that he was foaming at the mouth. That the Irish language might be a killer language, too, like English and German. That my father believes you can only kill or be killed." This belief takes on the power of prophecy, and his father's tragic end comes with all the intensity of myth.

Though Hugo Hamilton's story will mesmerize anyone whose identity mixes cultures or marks them as out of place in that place called home, the lyrical power of his writing stamps his story not as journalism but as literature -- and great literature at that. The Speckled People is an astonishing achievement, clearly a landmark in Irish nonfiction; and I cannot shake the conviction that for many years to come, it will be seen as a masterpiece.