The Sailor in the Wardrobe by Hugo Hamilton: book review

The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006) is Hugo Hamilton’s memoir of a brief period in his early life during the summer of 1967. Hamilton and his friend Packer were working for lobster fisherman Dan Turley on the harbour near Dublin in Ireland.

Hamilton, his sister Maria and brothers Franz and Ciarin, are the children of an Irish father and a German mother: ‘I am the son of a German woman who was shamed in front of the world, and the son of an Irishman who is refusing to surrender to the British.’ As an Irish-German he is teased as a child that cuts deeply into his adolescent years. He knows that he will be judged by what the Germans did. He knows he will be judged by what the Irish did.

That summer of 1967 he wants to escape. He wants to escape from his parents, and he wants to escape from his self-hatred.

His memoir tells of the transition from boyhood to manhood and his desperation to loosen the shackles of his mixed identity in a time of unrest in Ireland, and also globally, such as America’s civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. It is a book of remembering, but also trying to forget – of both nostalgia and amnesia.

The title comes from his grandfather, John Hamilton, who was locked in a wardrobe by his son (Hugo’s father). Hugo wants to be a sailor like his grandfather, and so he works for Dan Turley on his fishing boat. Dan Turley never smiles. Turley is a Catholic from Derry, and he has enemies. One of them is Tyrone, a Protestant from Belfast. The conflict is palpable. It reminds Hugo of the conflicts he has with his father.

Hugo’s German cousin, Stefan, comes to Ireland to visit. And promptly disappears on the west coast near Connemara. While the family look for him, Stefan returns ‘without warning.’ He says he was ‘looking for himself’ – just like Hugo is trying to do.

This is an interesting, well-written account of a troubled country and a troubled mind. It is the search for a self-identity without self-hatred. While these themes are strong throughout the book, they are not as powerfully explored as his first memoir, The Speckled People (2004) of his childhood. Yet it is still a theme that runs deeply and continuously in a repetitious cycle that makes Hugo question everything about him, his parents, his relatives, his life, his need to escape – as far away as possible – to England and beyond.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).