MEMOIR: To be "breac", "brack" or "speckled" is to be like a trout, a loaf with raisins, or half-German, half-Irish, or so the narrator's father tells him at the beginning of Hugo Hamilton's memoir, The Speckled People.
He tells him many other things too, such as " . . . your language is your home and your country is your language and your language is your flag" and that they must make a new Ireland, and that no English must be spoken or heard in their home, not even popular songs on the radio. This rule is enforced with beatings.
Mother, who is German, recalls her own girlhood in the small town of Kempen before the war, where she watched the Nazi brownshirts take over. She makes a distinction between "the fist people" and "the words people" and commends, what she calls, "the silent negative", which is the saying of No in the heart. "No one can make you smile," she tells the children, remembering her own rape by her boss during the war. He had tried to make her smile by lifting the corners of her mouth.
The antithesis of father and mother - a passionate and loving antithesis - forms the core of the book. As an antithesis, the marriage works after a fashion. Father and mother are two possible worlds in co-existence.
Ironically, mother's memory of the Nazis is precisely echoed in the father's behaviour and proto-fascist beliefs. He too hits his children and tries to make them smile by raising the corners of their mouths. His vision of a new Ireland is based as much on hatred and vanity as on love. He is a tyrant who opposes tyranny. His internal contradictions and furies drive the book along.
Mother offers the children a world of hope, folk wisdom, quiet resistance and gentle memory. Hamilton's drawing of her is one of the most substantially affectionate portraits of a parent I have read.
The opposition between fist and word, however, is impossible to resolve. The father's strict rules are, we understand, symptoms of a kind of madness. The children grow up in an environment that offers them no stable home. They are simply not Irish enough, nor ever could be. Mother gives them lederhosen and father gives them Irish knit pullovers. They are Irish on top and German below. Their Irish schoolmates call them Nazis and beat them up. Their father beats them up because they do not obey his rules or conform to his vision.
Father, who is a gifted orator, and a patriotic journalist, works regularly and tries to build ever new, faintly-heroic business enterprises to serve "the new Ireland". Each one fails and the last one kills him. Symbolically enough, the last project involves bees. Real bees-in-the-bonnet serve to put an end to the figurative ones by stinging him to death. Before then there are relatives, trips to the West of Ireland, trips to Germany, school residencies in the Gaeltacht. The family grows, expands, experiences its illnesses and disasters.
The voice Hamilton has chosen for the story is that of the very young child rehearsing words originally spoken by the mother. It is a voice full of primary colours that carries the complex, multi-hued consciousness of the adult. The mother's recollections are delicately interwoven with the chronology of the child's life and find resonant, symbolic echoes throughout. In this sense, the book's structure resembles that of a poem, each chapter with its juxtaposition of key images and choric phrases that recur, amplify and interpret each other. The development of the child's chest infection begins as he wipes the window with newspapers, as "a squeaking sound like wild dogs barking far away". The dogs get into his chest and remain there, howling. Images rise and resurface throughout the book. So do the clear and penetrating perceptions of childhood. When the narrator's younger brother, Franz, is beaten up by other boys for being German, the child-narrator observes: "When my father came home he was very angry, because nobody is allowed to hit Franz except him". That "except him" is a condemnation greater than ever adult exposition could muster.
Hamilton has always been an excellent storyteller. His sense of pace and necessary detail were evident in his earlier books, like The Last Shot and Sad Bastard, but here he moves onto another plane altogether. To recall and articulate the child's understanding and sensibility without sounding coy, sentimental or simply false is a very difficult task. To use this sensibility in a language that consistently reveals more than an ordinary adult's account might is an extraordinary achievement.
No one person's story is more important or significant in itself than anyone else's. A memoir though is a highly conscious work of the imagination, that organises, interprets and seeks significance in everything. It does exactly what memory does, but strives to understand itself better. This memoir has much to understand and offers that understanding to us. It uses memory against itself, protests against the emperor's cloak it provides, and wonders at the naked body beneath.
The Speckled People is, in short, a wonderful, subtle, problematic and humane book. It is about Ireland as well as about a particular family, but it is also about alternatives and complexities anywhere. It is about the speckled nature of the world, which, for all its violence, remains fresh to its perceivers.
• George Szirtes was born in Budapest. His most recent book of poetry is An English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe, 2001). In the autumn of 2000 he was Trinity College's first International Writing FellowGeorge Szirtes
The Speckled People. By Hugo Hamilton. Fourth Estate, 298pp.
£15.99.