A question of identity

'It's almost as if I'm telling my own story' says Hugo Hamilton of his latest novel about a boy who grows up struggling to come to terms with who he really is, writes Fiona McCann

HUGO HAMILTON IS affectingly unguarded, conversing with a kind of careful openness as he serves me tea and biscuits at the kitchen table in his bright Dun Laoghaire home. He is soft-spoken, with a quiet candour that appears at odds with the title if not the tone of his forthcoming novel, Disguise.

It represents a return to fiction for Hamilton, whose first five novels were followed in 2003 by The Speckled People, a moving and lyrical account of his childhood in Dublin in the 1950s, and in 2006 by its sequel, The Sailor in the Wardrobe. After such masterful autobiographical accounts, his return to the novel form appears like a new direction, but Hamilton is wary of the distinction. "My answer to that is to quote Thomas Bernhard who says there's no such thing as fiction," he says. "I think that's true in my case."

Disguise is the story of Gregor Liedmann, a three-year-old boy killed in the book's opening pages during the bombing of Berlin in the second World War. As his grieving mother mourns her lost son, her father Emil appears with an apparently orphaned refugee child and insists she take him in as a replacement son, even giving him the same name as the boy who died. The new Gregor Liedmann grows up oblivious to his true identity, until an accidental slip by his Uncle Max opens up the possibility that he is a Jewish survivor.

It's an emotive exploration of identity and heritage, illustrated in Liedmann's battles with the guilt passed down through his parentage, and the rejection of this allowed him through the discovery of his lost self. In this, Disguise is a book that sheds as much light on our global present as it does our defining past, with Liedmann the perfect metaphor for alienation. His easy symbolism makes it all the more surprising when Hamilton tells me candidly that Disguise is based on a true story.

"I went [to Berlin] in 1974 and I met this quite extraordinary man," he says. "He had this remarkable story to tell: that he had been found at the end of the war and passed on to his mother, that she had brought him up and he had replaced her son who was lost in the bombing in Berlin, and that he only found out from his uncle who blurted something out when he was 15, that he was actually possibly Jewish."

Around this real-life drama, Hamilton builds a hushed, subtle story exploring the complex nature of identity. "He's quite a tragic figure in a way because he could never position himself in any particular identity," says Hamilton. "He was part victim, part perpetrator, part belonging to a victim generation and also belonging to the Germans who were seen as the perpetrators."

It's a duality familiar to Hamilton, who recounts his own struggle growing up with an Irish father and German mother in post-war Europe in The Speckled People. Having been subjected to taunts of "Nazi" on the streets of his native Dun Laoghaire because of his mother's nationality, he has a personal understanding of how a generation of Germans coming to terms with the Holocaust required a full rejection of what came before in order to forge a new identity.

"It coincided with that period in Germany where every person hated their parents, so he ran away from home and travelled for 10 years and ended up in 1967 in Berlin back in the city where he was supposedly killed," says Hamilton of the man who inspired Disguise. "So he's this extraordinary ghostly figure coming back to life again."

IF THE STORY of Gregor Liedmann brings to life again the story of Hamilton's Berlin acquaintance, now dead, it also contains echoes of the writers' personal experiences, as he himself admits.

"It's almost as if I'm telling my own story with this novel," he says in a soft south Dublin accent that belies his battles with belonging, growing up as he did in a home where English, the language he now writes in, was forbidden by his Irish-speaking father.

"That's what I bring to the novel, in a way, because I was born with this Irish identity which was very strong, and also with a German identity," he says. The latter was something he learned quickly to repress, trading solely on his Irish heritage at a time when to be German carried with it a weight of condemnation. "I even went to Berlin in 1974 pretending that I was Irish only," he recalls. "I developed a sort of pidgin German which I got from my other Irish pals when we were over there because it was just simpler to be Irish."

Just as Gregor cuts off his adoptive family in an attempt to come to terms with who he is, Hamilton distanced himself from those he was closest to as he made his way into the adult world. "I have incidents that I've described where I've denied my own mother because I didn't want to be known as this German guy," he recalls. These conflicts of heritage were only resolved for Hamilton through the writing of his memoirs, an act which he says was necessary in order to pave the way for Disguise.

"I tried to deal with that whole issue of memory and identity and all of that in my novels up till then, but I was always spancelled by the fact that I'd never dealt with it head on," he says.

Finally doing so has allowed Hamilton to examine fully the aspects of his Irish and German pasts that have shaped him. "There was a huge self-loathing in Germany after the war," he says, contrasting it with a self- satisfied Irish sense of national identity built on our popularity on the international stage. "We [Irish] have this thing that we are loved by everybody."

Yet for Hamilton, behind the current Irish buoyancy is a historical imperative to dissemble and disguise that has become a part of the Irish psyche. "That thing of hiding your identity is something also quite Irish. We know how to do that very well, we know how to step in and out of role playing," he says. "I've described the Irish people in one of my memoirs as being the world's best actors."

Cautious of the pitfalls this entails, Hamilton has still always found it difficult to permanently separate himself from the country of his birth. "I should really have gone off to live in America or Canada where everybody also has that kind of mixed identity, and I would have felt at home with people," he says, then catches himself in that easy conclusion. "I tell myself that, but I'm not so sure. I really have this feeling that I need to come back to Dublin each time [I leave]." So is Dublin home now?

"Yes," he says, without hesitation, but he is quick to clarify. "Like it was for our mother, who was German, this became home because she had a family here, and this is where her postman brought the letters." He reaches further. "So it does matter then, where you live, because you see yourself stepping into the future there."

TO FIND THIS future, Hamilton delved into his own past, and into a global past that informs the political present. "Who's going to war at the moment? It's not the Germans," he points out. "After 60 years, that's an important fact." Germany may have learned from its mistakes, but global power shifts and mass migration have made questions of identity more relevant than ever.

"Maybe in this global environment I should forget my hang-ups but I don't think anybody else is forgetting theirs either," says Hamilton. "I think it's a key issue in the world now, that whole business of where you come from, who you are and what's important about identity." For Hamilton, this sense of identity is firmly tethered to language. Having grown up using both German and Irish, he accesses the different elements of his own make-up through the languages that embody them.

"One minute I'm reading a book in German, and the language places me very much in Germany, the next minute I'm switching on Radio na Gaeltachta and I'm listening to some country song in the Irish language, from Connemara, and I feel really at home there as well," he says.

The conflicts of his linguistic inheritance haven't daunted him, however, and with some of the bullheadedness seen in the young boy in The Speckled People who insists on giving the wrong answers, he has chosen instead to make language his stock in trade.

"Language is the only way of really coming to terms with anything in a significant way," he explains.

It is language, too, the removal of it, the replacement of it, the imposition of it, which has helped make him a writer. "I also think that it's possible that language trauma that we have in Ireland contributed to so many great writers coming from here, because there's this great need to express ourselves," he says.

For Hamilton, this attachment to words, whether characteristically Irish or part of a greater human need to locate ourselves in language, is as inescapable as ourselves in the end. "They matter to us, you know."

Hugo Hamilton's new novel, Disguise, will be published by Fourth Estate on July 7, £12.99. He will be taking part in the Dublin Writers' Festival with a reading at the Project Arts Centre on Thurs June 12 at 6pm, www.dublinwritersfestival.com