Disguise [Paperback]

How we shape our identity, and how we inherit our instability, marked Hamilton's fiction long before his memoir of growing up under an Irish-speaking father and a German refugee mother in 1960s Dublin, "The Speckled People," introduced him to many readers. I've admired each of his books; many today may not know much about his first three novels, all about Germany. (I reviewed this trio along with his stories in "Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow" on Amazon.)

"Disguise" continues the searches of earlier families where after the war someone seeks his parent or her child. A son learns how his mother accompanied a Nazi officer who may have fired "The Last Shot"; another German mother faces Stasi-era duplicity in her quest to reunite through "The Love Test"; an Irishman delves into the GDR upbringing of his hosts before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in that "Surrogate City."

These novels all satisfy; "Disguise" enriches Hamilton's treatment here subtly, and elegantly. I'd estimate, having read his previous eight books, that he's aiming here for targets closer to the haunted legacies of countrymen John Banville or Sebastian Barry. There's a control of phrase and pacing here that recalls also European models. "Every now and again, an apple falls to the ground with a bony kind of thud, such as the sound of a hoof on the earth. The discovery of gravity each time." (47) Or, as uncertainty advances: "His entire existence was in Mara's hands, in her imagination, in what she agreed to believe and what she would dismiss. She held him like a porcelain figure, at her mercy, waiting to be dropped to the floor in tiny pieces." (148) Hamilton selects his words patiently, mulling over simple phrases. His own tri-lingual upbringing (English, Irish, and German) may account for his style, which attains a filtered quality distinguishing it from his contemporaries.

He takes on the fringes of a topic that's often overwhelmed the talents of imaginative as well as historical talents: the Holocaust. Hamilton, typically, engages the difficult question asked by Gregor Liedmann (note symbolic echoes), with grace and poise. Was Gregor a Jewish orphan who replaced Marie Liedmann's boy, who died in a bombing near the end of the war? She refuses to admit this to herself or her husband, after he returns from Soviet imprisonment.

The plot alternates between Gregor's 2008 day picking apples (with his estranged wife, Mara, their son, Daniel, and some old hippie friends) and Gregor's exploration of his roots while growing up in the GDR. An omniscient narrator does not admit much more that we need to know, but a reader may be assured that the information given beyond the indirect first-person perspectives of Marie, Mara, or Gregor must be compared with crucial expository details given in the first chapter that are beyond Marie's immediate knowledge, if I am correct. Hamilton's skilled in producing a novel that scans very quickly, yet flows vividly, mixing poetry with philosophy.

Sentences, too many to cite (I jotted down eighteen representative references easily), reveal Hamilton's in top form. There's nuance and power evoked by wartime havoc and lasting grief. The tragedy that cloaks Germany burdens all. Gregor comes of age as if, in Mara's mind, he's unable to foster a talent for love. Mara learns from Marie a conflicting narrative that claims her son's always been such. Mara too enters an uncertain realm where the loyalty to present-day family contends against unsubstantial, unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, that tug him back to a vague allegiance. Early in her relationship with Gregor, she resolves: "Together they would work and travel and reinvent the void he had come from. They would reimagine his true origins like a lost part of music that had been burned in a fire." (66)

The tension of Gregor's reinvention stretches until the final chapter. I'm withholding plot points so as not to spoil your experience. Not a thriller, but as emotionally cathartic for more honesty and less melodrama in confronting the legacy of modern German loss, rage, and shame, Hamilton integrates his study, his family's own past, and his authorial observations into a thought-provoking analysis of survivor's guilt. As in his début novel, "Surrogate City," Berlin now celebrates enduring rather than dreams of greatness. Today, Hamilton finds comfort in a humane response, as in apple orchards, to earlier slaughter as faced by the elder Liedmann, Emil, in WWI, when the cows grazed among the dead in other fields nearby. Skillfully, as with armed Emil facing a battalion of enemy (Russian?) women, or when in a few phrases the whole absurdity of GDR behind the Wall sums itself up by a schoolboy's innocent questions, Hamilton's able to compress much into little space.

One small admission: Daniel, his partner Juli, as well as Mara's sometime lover and Gregor's old friend Martin, needed filling out. Their friends on the apple-gathering day also flit about like extras in a film, when perhaps Hamilton's application of the telling detail for each of them might have fixed their roles better for our appreciation. The Irish sojourn, again, as with the dentist Mr Eckstein, could have been deepened or eliminated; as it is there's either not enough substance or too much digression. John Joe could have been a contender for a truly memorable figure, but he, too, lingers in the supporting cast. Gregor wanders about a lot, but you fail to feel his desires on the road when doing so compared with Mara or Marie's own struggles.

Hamilton in his memoirs and fiction has roamed around Germany, Ireland, and Europe. He addresses cultural encounters within larger problems but strives, at his best here, to keep contact with immediate, recognizable people. He does not let ideas take over his major characters. This is a intelligent consideration of how we can all be warped by dreaming rather than loving, by yearning instead of accepting. Perhaps, as Mara wonders, to cope with our turmoil we all need a disguise, an invented identity?

I picked up this book at a library promotion knowing nothing of the author or his previous work. The story concerns the main character, Gregor's, search for identity.

The book starts in Berlin during WW2. A woman is at home with her son (Gregor) while her husband is away fighting. The house is bombed and the boy killed. Emil, her father, a shady character, comes to fetch her home to Nuremberg bringing with him a young orphan boy who takes the place of the dead child. Emil then disappears (later we learn betrayed by a friend, Max).

We come to present day Germany where the adult Gregor is picking apples in the rather idyllic location of an orchard belonging to his wife. Also present are his son, Daniel, with his girl friend and other friends of the family. These contemporary passages are written in the present tense in a rather poetic style. Interspersed are flashbacks to Gregor's past chronicling the growing uneasiness he felt about his origins.

The theme - of a living child substituted for a dead one - is coincidentally dealt with in passing in Tom Rob Smith's very successful `Child 44'. As he grows up Gregor feels increasingly uncomfortable with his aggressively masculine father who fills the house with hunting trophies. A chance remark causes him to seek out Max, Emil's friend, and learn the truth about his origins.

Identifying himself as a Jewish survivor he runs away from home and leads a peripatetic life making an income through his musicianship. He meets Mara, the woman he is to marry, and tells her he is a Jewish orphan. They have a child and all goes well until he receives a letter from the mother (whose existence he has denied) saying his father is dying. When his indignant wife goes off to see the family he leaves and starts his travels again. Mara gets on well with her mother-in-law who maintains that Gregor is her biological son and that Max was lying.

After more twists and turns the family are reunited at the apple-picking and the issues resolved.

I was left feeling somewhat unsympathetic to Gregor for his ruthlessness in pursuit of the truth at the expense of the happiness or peace of mind of the rest of his family - he could have made concessions earlier. However the book is interesting in drawing attention to the way events from the War still have an impact on modern day German society.

I found this to be a great book from a great writer. I have a true story of hidden identity and I'm struggling to write the book. I wish I could write half as well as Hugo Hamilton. If you just want to know the story then read the reviews or the back cover, whatever. I too should have liked to have discovered the boy/man's real identity, but this book was about real life where we don't always get the answers we want, nor do we get the parents we might choose.