There's no waking from the nightmare of history in this haunting—and sometimes heavy-handed—follow-up to Hamilton's prize-winning memoir, The Speckled People
. The author's coming-of-age in 1960s Dublin is dominated by his mother and father, she an anti-Nazi German immigrant, he an ardent Irish nationalist who bans the English language from their home. In this household, every conversation comes shackled to politics and tragedy—Hamilton's parents even compare Beatlemania to Nazism. No wonder the lad develops a Dostoyevskian guilt complex, forever imagining himself complicit in crimes he didn't commit, and longs "to have no past... no conscience and no memory." He escapes to a harbor-front job, but even there the Troubles loom when his Catholic boss feuds with a Protestant fisherman. The story often sags under the author's determination to set everyday happenings in dire historical context: when Hamilton fishes out a pal who fell into the harbor while retrieving a lobster pot, he immediately wishes, "I could bring others back as well... even those who died in Northern Ireland, even those who died in the Irish famine, or those who had been murdered in the Ukraine." But at his best, Hamilton writes with a wonderfully evocative feeling for character and landscape that brings to life the Ireland he grew up in. (Dec.)
