His grandfather was an Irish-speaking Munster poet but his father - wiped from the record by his son - served and died in the British Navy.Īn engineer in Dublin, Jack Hamilton dedicated his life to the anti-British, nationalist cause, and above all to the rehabilitation of the Irish language. The man she married, Jack Hamilton - or Sean Ó hUrmoltaigh, as he renamed himself - belonged to a west Cork family, from Leap and Skibbereen, that beautiful country marked with a history of nationalism, poverty, famine, religion and emigration.

She left Germany to go on a pilgrimage in Ireland and stayed on. She and her family lived through terrible times under the Nazis and in the war she was abused and raped by her employer. Her mother was an opera singer there were five sisters. Her father fought in the first world war, owned a stationery shop and died when she was nine. His mother, Irmgard Kaiser, came from Kempen, a small town in Germany. Hamilton grew up in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s with his brother and sisters. This story about a battle over language and a defeat in 'the language wars' is also a victory for eloquent writing, crafty and cunning in its apparent simplicity. It is a bold strategy, because it does so call Joyce to mind, but it pays off handsomely. Gradually, what the child-narrator sees and hears begins to turn into what he knows and understands - secrets, conflicts, histories, beliefs. But Hamilton gives the story as he hears it from his father it's up to us to provide the historical background. This refers to the exposure by Protestant nationalist writer Hubert Butler - very unwelcome to the Irish Catholic Church - of the wartime campaign in Croatia to forcibly convert half a million Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism. One example: the father admires Cardinal Stepinac, who he thinks 'should be made into a saint'. It incorporates in passing, but often without much annotation, a complex web of allusions to literature, politics and history. More like the early pages of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, it's shaped like a fiction, told, as if naively, in the language of a child.

It does not subtitle itself a memoir (though the blurb calls it one), and it's not a straightforward reminiscence. Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People triumphantly avoids the Angela's Ashes style of sentimental nostalgia and victim claims, and stands up well in the mighty, unending competition for most memorable Irish life-story.

The speckled people by hugo hamilton