A divided cultural inheritance is always rich fictional ground for a writer and Hugo Hamilton has explored his dual Irish/German identity obliquely in his three novels, Surrogate City, The Last Shot and The Love Test.
In his first collection of short stories, Hamilton exchanges the broad, continental horizons of his novels for the smaller end of the telescope, an Ireland viewed through a Germanic filter.
"Nazi Christmas" is a case in point. One of the strongest stories - in the collection, it describes the plight of a German family growing up in post war Ireland.
A jokey "Achtung!" by the local fishmonger, trying out the language of films like The Great Escape and Vou Ryan's Express, unleashes a round of racist banter that culminates in the German children being rounded upon by their Irish playmates in a scene of mock execution.
"It was as though the man in the fish shop had let out a profane secret about us. The word was out. Our assumed identity as Irish children was blown. Everywhere we went, the German past floated on the breeze after us `Heil Hitler!' we heard them shout, on the way to Mass, on the way to school, on the way back from the shops.
The worst the children suffer is a pelting with snowballs, but Hamilton creates a taut air of menace in the midst of the absurd comic book German ("Halt! We must not forgetten der change,") and the casual stereotyping of the entire German race.
This taste for the surreal, the cool understatement of Hamilton's prose and the veracity of felt experience gives "Nazi Christmas" an emotional clout missing from many of the other stories here, however.
The most successful are those which trade on a clash of cultures: Freedom of Speech follows a young couple, an East German woman and an unidentified male narrator on a trip to Morocco.
The woman, liberated by the fall of the Wall and the recent inventor of family money, carries with her the assorted emotional baggage of her German inheritance. She ends up humiliating the couple's Moroccan tourist guide, Mustafa. His revenge is to hold the couple at gunpoint, and rob them of their money.
The narrator gets away abandoning his girlfriend to her fate at the hands of Mustafa and his brothers. A small microcosm of German history gets played out in sweltering Fez - cruelty, shame, humiliation and punishment.
In "The Compound Assembly of E Richter", Frank, an Irishman sharing a flat with a German couple in Berlin, is emotionally wrong footed when Werner, his flatmate suggests that his girlfriend Evelyn, may be in love with Frank.
Although Frank is pushed into the role of the accused, he gains the upper hand in the threesome in a story as much about the subversive power of language and silence as it is about sexual love and longing.
"Fog" is a hilarious social commentary on the underside of city life, highlighting a culture clash of a different kind. Claire is a Kissogram girl who is called out unknowingly on an assignment by her ex husband. "Her driver and escort is the Gorilla, whose head like a hood, flung back to reveal the real man underneath. All men are gorillas, she thinks."
Hamilton cleverly cultivates the sense of men and women playing out mythic roles dressed in outlandish costumes, while delighting in the absurdity of it all.
He's also good at mood pieces, as in the title story, a lyrical evocation of other cities and countries invading the lives of a married couple becalmed in Dublin. "Front door open wide for Alberta sunshine along a Dublin hallway. Air outside almost as passive as the inside of the house, which seems like the carriage of a train stopped in the middle of a prairie."
But for all Hamilton's obvious delight in the lyrical and the surreal in these stories, the remainder of the collection seems flaccid, lugubrious and dull. His spare prose and cool detachment, which serve his novels so well, cannot save the rest of this venture into short fiction from a curious emotional emaciation and an absence of fictional conviction.