The Speckled People (Hardcover)

Why is it that Irish childhoods are somehow more interesting than any other? The Speckled People is yet another tale of rough and tumble childhood in Ireland in the 1950s. Instead of the hard-drinking, lovable father and weak abandoned mother of Frank McCourt's boyhood we're given the odd mix of an Irish nationalist father married to a German immigrant with a Nazi past. The premise seems to be rich and wide, but the whole book turns out to be rather intimate and personal. This is less a comment on Ireland and Germany after the war and more Hugo Hamilton's youthful journey of self discovery.

Hamilton writes in a style that can best be called "Irish immediate". Everything happens in the first person with a sudden awareness and blunt description. This style is charming at first, but wearing with time. Nevertheless, the narrator's exploration of his secret past, his comic boyhood adventures and conflicts captivate the reader, and one is carried away by the story. The interplay between the fierce Irish nationalism and the German identity of the narrator's mother is interesting, but they are only the outward sign of an inward discovery as the narrator strives to understand himself. As in any cross-cultural clash, the conflict ends in a fresh synthesis. So Hugo discovers his own identity and realises that he does not have to be either German or Irish, but a unique blend of both. --Dwight Longenecker

* 'This is the most gripping book I've read in ages. And it's beautifully written: what could have been safe memories are made new-lived and real in this fascinating, disturbing and often very funny memoir.'' Roddy Doyle * 'The Speckled People is poetic in its language and construction, lyrical in so many of its descriptions. There is a story full of several different kinds of passion with a real tragedy at its heart. The pain is all there, but so is its antidote.' Margaret Forster * 'Donner und Blitzen! What the Jaysus! A memoir of warmth and wisdom. And at last a good - if flawed - Irish father. A beautiful German mother. And not too much rain. It is tender and profound and, best of all, tells the truth. I loved it.' Patrick McCabe * 'A fine and timely book from an exquisitely gifted writer, this is beautiful, subtle, unflashy, perfectly realised and quite extraordinarily powerful.' Joseph O'Connor

'We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins.' The raisins pepper his skin with specks and make him different from the other children on the Dublin streets. The gang call him and his brother Eichmann and Hitler and the little boys know that the jeers will turn into torture and certain execution if their tormentors catch them alone. Acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has captured the voice of childhood to relate his experience of growing up: a baffled half-understanding, a reluctant obedience to his father's harsh rules and, finally, rebellion. His father was Irish and insisted that the children speak Irish, punishing them violently if they brought English words into the house. Their loving mother was German and, along with her language and her courageous history, gave them a more gentle morality. Over and over again she would tell them not to fight back for they were 'the word people and not the fist people' and the best defence was 'the silent negative'. Scarcely any other children spoke Irish and their mother's German accent made her hard to understand so the brothers and sisters became more and more isolated. A child hears what an adult says but only gradually begins to make sense of it. This spiral development is present in the structure of the book so that stories are glimpsed and later returned to, and details are repeated and added as the child becomes mature enough to comprehend. Hamilton is never sentimental, never self-pitying; indeed he is harder on himself, or rather the child that he was, than on his parents, but he describes a life where language was a weapon rather than a means of communication. This is an extraordinary book, beautifully written and desperately poignant. (Kirkus UK)

Novelist Hamilton (Sad Bastard, 2002, etc.) recalls childhood in Dublin with a German mother and an Irish father so intensely chauvinistic he would not allow English to be spoken in his home. As one of the "speckled people" (not purely Irish), the author suffered especially for his German blood in post-WWII Dublin. Other youngsters labeled his brother "Hitler," called Hugo "Eichmann," and a couple of times held mock trials, once condemning "Eichmann" to death for war crimes. They had actually begun to carry out the sentence when Hamilton managed a sort of perverse Tom Sawyer escape. Fundamentally concerned with language, the memoir begins with a stark, spare sentence of the sort that Hamilton favors ("When you're small you know nothing") and ends years later in Germany in the gloom of evening as he and his widowed mother have lost their way. Hamilton shuffles several stories in this ample deck: his own rough coming-of-age; his father's feckless attempts to make a fortune (Dad failed as an importer of wooden crosses from Oberammergau, as a builder of children's wooden toys, and as a beekeeper, stung to death by the ungrateful little buggers); and, most alarming of all, his mother's account of brutal serial rapes she suffered at age 19 from her employer, a randy businessman cozy with the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, Hamilton's mother says her family was not cozy with the Nazis; her intrepid sister once declared in public that it was a shame an assassination attempt on Hitler had failed. Hamilton employs a weird recurring image of a dog that goes to the seashore every day and barks itself hoarse at the waves. Many years later-many dog-years later-an adolescent Hamilton, having decided being a Nazi isn't such a bad thing, nearly drowns the animal for spite. Hamilton writes well and knows the secrets of narrative propulsion, but his story does not always engage or convince. (Kirkus Reviews)