The father of all battles

That grandfather is the sailor of this book’s title, but the focus remains on the youthful Hugo’s struggle with his father. Rather than writing a sequel, he has stitched in the background in more detail, focusing on a particular long summer, possibly 1972, when he was 17. The story ends with his decision to live and work in Germany. Thus this instalment closes earlier than its predecessor, which ended with his father’s heart attack, brought on by bee stings, and his mother ‘s belated venture into a kind of freedom.

The Sailor in the Wardrobe sets out to make certain amends. While the father is still violent, chauvinist and sentimental, his opposition to political violence is emphasised, as is his disagreement with Gearoid, co-founder of Aiseri (who had criticised his partner’s 1940 article, “Ireland’s Jewish Problem” for not going far enough).

But Hugo’s father is recognisably the same autodidactic bully as before: there is a wonderful description of the home-made phonograph that he constructs, smelling richly of varnish and dedicated to the voice of Elizabeth Schwarz- kopf until Hugo replaces her with John Lennon and forgets to take him off the turntable.

Even then O hUrmoltaigh gives the Beatles an Irish name, “Na Ciaroga”. (Hugo’s point that Lennon is “more Irish” than Schwarzkopf does not save him.) There are more violent clashes but the father’s propensity for sentimental apology is more in evidence, as is the closeness of his parents’ relationship. If this is a deliberate redress, it weakens the impact and is not always psychologically convincing. Gearoid is more consistent in keeping the faith; he drags his own son, howling with pain, away from an operation on a tooth abscess, because of the dentist’s inability to converse in Irish.

The Hamilton universe is counterpointed by other themes of guilt and violence. From the North, images of Army brutality and tit-for-tat killings permeate through television and radio. By day, Hugo works at the local harbour for a fisherman, himself a Northerner, who is enmeshed in a mysterious feud that ends in death. Mrs Hamilton’s family re-enters the picture when a German cousin comes to stay and reveals that he, too, is in flight from a father whose wartime experience casts a shadow over his family.

Hidden histories lie behind everything: the harbour feud, the ancient book that Hugo’s mother keeps hidden in her bedroom, the evidence of John Hamilton’s naval career, the version of Irish experience that his father disinters from family memory in west Cork.

“My father lets us hold his ancient book, in the same way that my mother lets us look through her ancient book. They want us to feel close to the time in the past when these books were printed or written. They want us to be witnesses. They want us to be time-travellers, living in the past, sometime in the 19th century in west Cork, or even further back in the 17th century in Mainz. They want us to keep all that history in our heads. But you can’t remember something that you have not seen with your own eyes. You can remember people talking about things that happened long ago, but you can’t remember things that you have not witnessed.”

This simple truth is posited against past imprisonments and the complications of escape. As before, Hamilton patterns the institutions and structures of family life, with his father’s rules, curfews, punishments and terrifying rages, against the larger tyrannies of history. Simultaneously, he handles the conflicts, threats and aggressions of life outside the home, much of which has to be kept secret, words of piercing clarity and immediacy convey his sense of guilt, in a world where terrible events continually hang above his head like the clouds drifting in from the sea.

The Joycean struggle of father and son is partially resolved in a series of epiphanies; the father even speaks English. But with the author’s flight to Germany, I remembered his first novel, Surrogate City, published 16 years ago. It dealt with young Irish people in Berlin before the wall came down; its sureness, precision and sense of existentialist bleakness made it a remarkable debut, but it seemed to have oddly little to say.

Hamilton was clearly a writer who would repay watching, but it was not clear where he was going. Several books intervened in different genres: with The Speckled People style and subject at last converged to produce a classic. This new book reads like a gloss on that story, a less supercharged companion-piece, and its impact is lessened. Still, in a world where “identity” has become a worn-out concept indeed, Hamilton’s Irish-German-English voice remains unique. The question is where he will project it next.

The Sailor in the Wardrobe is Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, from Monday February 20 at 9.45am

Receive a free copy of The Speckled People when you buy The Times at WHSmith high street stores on Monday January 30, as part of our forthcoming Page-turning reads promotion. Visit www.timesonline.co.uk/bookcollection for more information