Hugo Hamilton grew up in a Dublin household where the English language was forbidden, and he has delighted in its illicit and innocent pleasures ever since. In his memoir A Speckled People he wrote about speaking German to his mother and Irish to his nationalist father, while, beyond their front door, children played, mothers shopped, and rock
bands sang in the former oppressors’ tongue.
His most recent protagonist, Vid Cosic is a young Serb from Belgrade who has come to work on the building sites of the Irish boom. He falls in, by way of the easy kind of accident that Dublin affords, with a lawyer, Kevin Concannon, and they become friends. Their relationship is drunken and aimless, but it is also bound by a high-minded, almost severe brand of male loyalty. “A friend is someone who would put his hand in the fire for you,” says Concannon, who, we suspect, is better at dramatizing friendship than living it. Vid knows he is not the first person to find the Irish both urgent and irresponsible in these matters; in the way they confuse strangers with their great openness and their lack of follow through. Perhaps, he says, it is because of centuries of emigration, which made all connections temporary and turned every friend a man had into “a trapdoor opening up underneath his feet.”
Vid is slow to form opinions. An opinion is a form of ownership, and as a stranger, both in the country and in the language, he owns very little. He can read only the surface. Intentions, his own included, are not clear. Meanwhile, the past and the sins of the past refuse either to connect with the present or to go away.
After a violent incident that binds Vid and Kevin together for the course of the novel, they park on the quays looking out over the port of Dublin. “We waited for the future to come, wondering if he was going to drive over the edge. We might as well have gone underwater as it was, driving along the floor of the sea.” The world beneath the water haunts the book. A woman tells of how she reached down to pick up a starfish in the same waters, only to find “it was not a starfish she was holding at all, but the hand of a young man.” Vid becomes interested in and then obsessed by one of Kevin’s relatives, Maire Concannon, whose drowned body, shamefully pregnant, washed up on Inis Mor many years before.
Vid sees many islands, not just the Aran Islands in the west — the most iconic Irish landscape of them all — but also Dalkey Island in the east, and Dursey Island in the south, which is joined to the mainland by cable car. This is used to transport sheep as well as people, and in it Vid is overpowered “by the smell of sheep shit and sheep fear and possibly my own fear included.” He imagines the “door opening and the sheep falling down into the sea, one by one,” but that does not happen and he continues his journey across the landscape, from beauty to beauty, without knowing what it means.
He travels west to investigate the death of Maire, a story that Kevin and his family are not interested in. The past is something all the characters try to put behind them. When their milder methods of forgetting — boredom, denial, snobbery — are not enough, they turn to more radical means, to anger, sex and drugs. “Junkies are the real exiles now,” Vid says. Sex with his girlfriend “seems to prohibit all memory,” making him “truly blank.” Above all, the characters take refuge in drink. If this is an account of boom-time Ireland, a country where friendship is an ambush and no one in a supermarket ever says hello, the most telling moments happen during the furious late-night chaos that we, as a society, call “fun.”
Hand in the Fire might be read as a conventional character-driven novel with a strong story. It could also be seen as a social novel, the first in the Irish tradition that is written from an eastern European point of view. But sentence by sentence, it is also a refusal to fall through the open trapdoor. Hamilton loves the spaces between things: his characters live, not just between cultures or between languages, but between the past and the future; they stay suspended between innocence and guilt, between knowledge and the lack of it.
Language attaches itself to the world as though for the first time. The world itself is seen “in translation,” and each thing he writes is playful and clear. It is as though his characters have shrugged off an extra skin — their cultural hides — and this makes them tender and new. A natural modernist, Hamilton is a great international writer who just happens to be Irish. His is the voice of the migrant, the mongrel, of the person who is neither one thing nor the other, of the stranger and the traveler in us all.
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