Book review: A quiet story of personal crisis that swells into tumultuous tide of history

Hugo Hamilton: Asks urgent questions of how is it possible to live without being overwhelmed. Picture: Christian Jungeblodt

• Conversations with the Sea
• Hugo Hamilton
• Hachette Books, €16.99

Hugo Hamilton’s latest novel, Conversations with the Sea, centres on Lukas Dorn, a forlorn, lonesome middle-aged German man who has come to stay in a guest house on Achill Island following the breakdown of his marriage. 

Lukas writes in his journal, wanders the moonlit bogs, watches rapture-pursuing surfers from a distance, observes an escaped horse run into the Atlantic, and collects a sick, elderly friend from the hospital.

But Lukas is suffering from something more troubling than a bad dose of weltschmerz; he is haunted on a personal level by the memory of his deceased migrant mother, who died when he was just nine, and his aloof, history professor father. 

Lukas has suffered a breakdown, living as if ‘he was afraid of his own memory’. 

Eventually, Lukas concludes, his wife Katia has left him because ‘his obsession with the past must have driven her away’.

This obsession with the past is so great that it effectively prevents Lukas from living functionally in the present.

From that perspective Conversations with the Sea might appear to be a study in remote middle-aged male self-absorption. 

Yet initially what seems to be a quiet story of a personal crisis is slowly revealed to be a profound meditation on how the tumults of our contemporary world are inescapably shaped within the continuum of history.

Personal traumas are subtly contextualised by larger political dramas playing out for other people elsewhere. 

Back in Berlin, Katia is under investigation for apparently enabling a student antiwar protest in front of Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, while his troubled daughter, Emilia, gets arrested at a street protest. 

Later, Lukas befriends a woman named Mira and her son Omar, refugees from an unspecified war-torn country and survivors of terrible violence, now living in Mayo.

A picture of Noble Prize winner Heinrich Böll in Lukas’ guesthouse (unnamed and referred to only as a German writer wearing a black beret) provides an artistic framework for the novel. 

Böll, who had a long connection with Achill, wrote about Germany’s troubling history, and is described here as a writer ‘whose sense of compassion and moral concern were no longer in demand’. 

The references to Guernica and Böll speak to lingering questions in the novel about the potency of art as a moral force in the face of powerlessness.

The sea is a metaphor for the engulfing force of history: there are those who surf atop the surface (Lukas rejects the surfers’ well-meaning hipster invitation to chase the sublime moment), and there are those like Lukas, who literally and figuratively is at risk of drowning under the mighty pull of the waves.

Lukas is so debilitated he appears at times to be someone for whom joy, or even mere pleasure, however fleeting, is not just emotionally possible but morally impermissible. 

And yet he is not without empathy. Lukas brings Mira and Omar to visit Achill’s deserted village in a clumsy if well-intentioned effort to connect their experience of displacement with Irish and German history. 

Yet the impression remains in this serious, urgent novel that we each experience trauma in our own way.

‘There is no equality in suffering,’ Lukas says, ‘only duplication … More dead bodies. History on top of history. Emptiness upon emptiness.’

Conversations with the Sea is a precise, masterly novel that encompasses themes of trauma, displacement, war, history, love, hope, and hopelessness.

Hamilton asks urgent questions of how is it possible to live without being overwhelmed as the spectators of our own histories.

He writes with exacting clarity about this danger, bringing us deeper into the complexity, deeper into the moral heart of the crisis.