Disguise (Fourth Estate, £7.99) is Hugo Hamilton’s first novel since his prize-winning memoir, The Speckled People (2003). This was the book that made Hamilton’s name, one of the best accounts of childhood written for many years. It told the story of Hamilton’s childhood in post-war Ireland, the son of a nationalist Irish father, a monstrous figure who refused to let his children speak English.
Disguise is also about a strange childhood after the war but it is set in post-war Germany. It begins with a powerful account of the chaos as Germans flee from the advancing Red Army. In the mayhem, a young woman who has lost her son in a bombing raid is given a little boy, whom she names Gregor after her dead child, and brings up as her own.
The rest of this powerful novel questions everything we have been told in the opening chapter. Was Gregor a Jewish boy adopted by Germans, as he grows up believing, or is he really the natural child of his German parents?
The novel moves back and forward in time, between three crucial moments. First, there is Year Zero, the collapse of Hitler’s Germany, when Gregor’s mother tries to return to Bavaria where she is re-united with her husband who has returned from the Eastern Front. Gregor’s childhood becomes a battleground between a strange, obsessive father and his sensitive son.
Gregor leaves Bavaria for 1960s Berlin, where he re-invents himself as a trumpeter, laid-back hippy — and Jew. He has disowned his family and builds a new life, married with a son, but then, as his wife starts to question Gregor’s version of his life, he panics and abandons them just as he had abandoned his adoptive parents. His whole life becomes built around flight and escape.
Disguise confirms Hamilton as among the best of his generation
This past is interwoven with the present, as Gregor, now in his 60s, returns to visit his wife and tries to end the pattern of abandonment which has dominated his life.
His wife is still determined to settle the truth about her husband’s life story: Is he Jewish or German, adopted or not? Has his whole life been a lie, and, most interesting of all, does it matter? Can we escape our past? Must our origins rule our lives?
This personal drama of identity and memory is set against a bigger story of Germany’s quest for a new identity and a way of dealing with its own past traumas, with 1945, the 1960s and 1989 as key moments in both stories.
Hamilton tells the story superbly, keeping the reader in suspense until the very end, moving delicately between past and present, between Gregor’s story and Germany’s history.
There are some powerful, dark set-pieces and, if some of the characters are a little weak, the storytelling is superb, the issues raised fascinating and complex. Disguise confirms Hugo Hamilton as one of the best writers of his generation.
