A man returns to the west coast of Ireland, last seen on his honeymoon 20 years earlier. His marriage in Berlin is collapsing. His wife is under investigation for her possible role in a student protest; their daughter has stopped eating properly. He meets an old friend, befriends a refugee, and they go to the pub. He brings only a notebook, filling it with images and fragments. Surfers on the coast, wild horses, phone calls back to Berlin, memories from childhood: his mother’s absence, his father’s mysterious work as a Holocaust scholar.
No summary can capture the near-perfect beauty of Conversation with the Sea. The novel moves through dream images and deep memory. Its prose is fresh and clear, yet shadowed by menace. There’s a sensitivity to the hidden realm of symbols. A horse standing in a field becomes a harbinger of some invisible harm, of psychic violence returning. It is Picasso’s shrieking horse from Guernica. The blue smoke of burning peat mutates into a subterranean fire. Wetsuits drying on a night line hang like abandoned skins. These images slowly circle a question reason can’t reach: the question of suicide.
The harm here is deeply personal yet impossible to contain, radiating into something cosmic. The German protests go unnamed, the violence remains unlocalised, and this defamiliarisation evokes a piercing horror. Through this Hamilton captures the familiar contours of discourse while cutting through its noise: “Was she aware how offended the present was at being compared to the past?”
Lukas, the narrator, is painfully attuned to the world’s injuries and its harsh beauty. The novel is not without humour; it slips in unexpectedly during his phone calls with his wife, when we recognise her longing for a life without him. (He is, admittedly, not much fun.) Hamilton presents, in very few words, the truth of her perspective, her commendable instinct for life, while still rendering Lukas’s agony with deep sympathy.
Stories behind the songs: The lyrics of Oasis and Manic Street Preachers explored
Venetian Vespers by John Banville: An intricate thriller and a slyly fashioned work of art
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk: a mesmerising display of skill
Honing the craft of the Irish Writers Centre: ‘It’s a great story to tell, as we are a nation of storytellers’
It’s this emotional and moral depth that makes reading Hugo Hamilton so refreshing, like encountering the only adult in the room. At its core, the novel grapples with a simple question: how to live in this world without numbing oneself to its horrors. Though rooted in our current political moment, the novel is rendered with a timeless, dreamlike purity.
