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Hand in the Fire
You have a funny way of doing things here. The voice is that of Vid Cosic, a Serbian immigrant whose immediate friendship with a young Dublin lawyer, Kevin Concannon, is overshadowed by a violent incident in which a man is left for dead in the street one night. The legal fallout forces them into an ever closer, uncertain partnership, drawing Vid right into the Concannon family, working for them as a carpenter on a major renovation project and becoming more and more involved in their troubled family story. While he claims to have lost his own memory in a serious accident back home in Serbia, he cannot help investigating the emerging details of a young woman from Connemara who was denounced by the church and whose pregnant body was washed up on the Aran Islands many years ago. Was it murder or suicide? And what dark impact does this event in the past still have on the Concannon family now? As the deadly echo of hatred and violence begins to circle closer around them, Vid finds this spectacular Irish friendship coming under increasing threat with fatal consequences. Drawing on his own speckled, Irish-German background, Hugo Hamilton has given us a highly compelling and original view of contemporary Ireland, the nature of welcome and the uneasy trespassing into a new country.
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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About the author
Hugo Hamilton
38 books92 followersHugo Hamilton is an Irish writer.
Hamilton's mother was a German who travelled to Ireland in 1949 for a pilgrimage, married an Irishman, and settled in the country. His father was a militant nationalist who insisted that his children should speak only German or Irish, but not English, a prohibition the young Hugo resisted inwardly. "The prohibition against English made me see that language as a challenge. Even as a child I spoke to the walls in English and secretly rehearsed dialogue I heard outside," he wrote later.
As a consequence of this, he grew up with three languages - English, Irish and German - and a sense of never really belonging to any: "There were no other children like me, no ethnic groups that I could attach myself to".
Hamilton became a journalist, and then a writer of short stories and novels. His first three novels were set in Central Europe. Then came Headbanger (1996), a darkly comic crime novel set in Dublin and featuring detective Pat Coyne. A sequel, Sad Bastard, followed in 1998.
Following a year spent in Berlin on a cultural scholarship, he completed his memoir of childhood, The Speckled People (2003), which went on to achieve widespread international acclaim. Telling the story through the eyes of his childhood self, it painfully evoked the struggle to make sense of a bizarre adult world. It "triumphantly avoids the Angela's Ashes style of sentimental nostalgia and victim claims," wrote Hermione Lee in the The Guardian . "The cumulative effect is to elevate an act of scrupulous remembering into a work of art," commented James Lasdun in the New York Times. The story is picked up in the 2006 volume, The Sailor in the Wardrobe.
In May 2007, German publisher Luchterhand published Die redselige Insel (The Talkative Island), in which Hamilton retraced the journey Heinrich Böll made in Ireland that was to be the basis of his bestselling book Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) in 1957. Hamilton's most recent novel, Disguise was published on June 6, 2008.
Hugo Hamilton lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ham...
Hamilton's mother was a German who travelled to Ireland in 1949 for a pilgrimage, married an Irishman, and settled in the country. His father was a militant nationalist who insisted that his children should speak only German or Irish, but not English, a prohibition the young Hugo resisted inwardly. "The prohibition against English made me see that language as a challenge. Even as a child I spoke to the walls in English and secretly rehearsed dialogue I heard outside," he wrote later.
As a consequence of this, he grew up with three languages - English, Irish and German - and a sense of never really belonging to any: "There were no other children like me, no ethnic groups that I could attach myself to".
Hamilton became a journalist, and then a writer of short stories and novels. His first three novels were set in Central Europe. Then came Headbanger (1996), a darkly comic crime novel set in Dublin and featuring detective Pat Coyne. A sequel, Sad Bastard, followed in 1998.
Following a year spent in Berlin on a cultural scholarship, he completed his memoir of childhood, The Speckled People (2003), which went on to achieve widespread international acclaim. Telling the story through the eyes of his childhood self, it painfully evoked the struggle to make sense of a bizarre adult world. It "triumphantly avoids the Angela's Ashes style of sentimental nostalgia and victim claims," wrote Hermione Lee in the The Guardian . "The cumulative effect is to elevate an act of scrupulous remembering into a work of art," commented James Lasdun in the New York Times. The story is picked up in the 2006 volume, The Sailor in the Wardrobe.
In May 2007, German publisher Luchterhand published Die redselige Insel (The Talkative Island), in which Hamilton retraced the journey Heinrich Böll made in Ireland that was to be the basis of his bestselling book Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) in 1957. Hamilton's most recent novel, Disguise was published on June 6, 2008.
Hugo Hamilton lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ham...
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 6, 2019
It's interesting to look at a country and its people, especially your own, through the eyes of an outsider. Hugo Hamilton offers us the Vid Cosic, a Serbian now living in Dublin as our guide in this novel. Vid has little memory of his past, nor does he want it. Because of this he becomes more interested in the past of his new home and the people around him, namely the Concannon family. Kevin Concannon practically forces his friendship on Vid and brings him into the centre of his life. Vid cannot help but become interested and involved, only to find that the Concannon family isn't ready to deal with its own past.
Behind a lot of the story is another, that of an unmarried pregnant woman who was denounced by the church and whose dead body washed up on the Aran Islands many years early. This story seems to be based on truth, though the rest of the novel is fiction built around it. There seems to be a certain theme running throughout the novel, one in which everyone wishes to forget the mistakes taught by history only to repeat them (or nearly repeat them).
This is a good novel, well written and interesting. Hamilton portrays a contemporary Ireland (Northern Ireland included, for a little bit), one where history revolves around stories of rebellion and troubles, one where the sins are always of the fathers, one devoid of personal guilt.
Behind a lot of the story is another, that of an unmarried pregnant woman who was denounced by the church and whose dead body washed up on the Aran Islands many years early. This story seems to be based on truth, though the rest of the novel is fiction built around it. There seems to be a certain theme running throughout the novel, one in which everyone wishes to forget the mistakes taught by history only to repeat them (or nearly repeat them).
This is a good novel, well written and interesting. Hamilton portrays a contemporary Ireland (Northern Ireland included, for a little bit), one where history revolves around stories of rebellion and troubles, one where the sins are always of the fathers, one devoid of personal guilt.
July 14, 2012
The title of the book refers to Concannon’s definition of a friend – someone who will put their hand in the fire to protect someone regardless of the consequences. And this is the sentiment at the heart of the book, which explores the nature of friendship, family and the immigrant experience. It’s a well written story, with some nice observations and insights. I’m not sure to what extent it was an Irish story though, which the opening lines strongly suggest it will be. Ireland is there, but more as a backdrop rather than as contextual arena. The plot is relatively straightforward and clearly telegraphed, though one suspects it was never meant to have a twist, being an in-depth study of relationship than a mystery, despite the hauntings of the violent attack and the drowned woman that surfaces throughout. The characterisation of Cosic is well developed, though he seemed overly naïve, pliant and childlike at times, to the point of lacking credibility, but Concannon remains something of an enigma. The reader is repeatedly told he is charming, but there is precious little evidence that that’s the case, and one is left wondering why his long suffering girlfriend or Cosic tolerate his selfish and confrontational behaviour. It’s not that he’s not a believable character, but rather that the character that the reader engages with is not the same one that the other characters seemingly interact with, producing a strange dischord. Overall, I found it an interesting read, with some nice writing and observations, but the central relationship never seemed fully credible and the plot failed to really excite.
December 30, 2019
As a German migrant into Ireland, Hamilton uses his almost unique experience to write another novel about migration and its effects, this time focussing on friendship and the possibility that first generation migrants can never achieve close relationships with the native born, forever remaining outsiders. He uses his first person narrator Vid, a Serbian, encountering in comedic ways, the absurdities and ironies of learning to survive in Ireland. The setting is the port town of Dun Leoghaire, looking for work as a carpenter, “working on the accent, learning all the cliches” and of course, picking up the formal, rather than the colloquial vocabulary. His first substantial job, ironically for one fleeing from violent memories and suppressed memories of the Serbian, Bosnian conflict, is as a security officer in a nursing home.
“Each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty” and here, “a true friend is somebody who would put his hand in the fire for you.” After Vid's initial fear of a barman using his knife to slice a lemon but also to wave near his face when giving directions, he begins his slow course of learning to cope with Irish pub culture and its incongruous combination of charm, apparent friendship, strange codes, drunkenness and raging, violent males. When Vid is bashed for talking outside with a rebellious daughter when her drunk, controlling father suddenly becomes the defender of her honour when he draws all the wrong conclusions, Vid really does need an Irish friend. Unfortunately, Kevin, who is a lawyer who has given Vid work restoring his mother's cottage, is also drunk and enraged at the father's attack. Violence is heaped upon violence and you can guess who ends up in court being prosecuted for attacking the father. The comedy is now dark indeed. Kevin advises Vid to say nothing to the police and is the one true friend that Vid needs desperately. The court case reminded me of Beckett whom Hamilton references several times about the darkness beneath Irish charm and the paralysis that people feel in the face of authority.
Vid begins to feel like a tied down Gulliver ensnared in the complications of owing Kevin, working in his mother's house and becoming involved with his family and the prospect of revenge being taken as a result of the pub bashing, revenge being something with which a young man fleeing Serbia during the war was all too well acquainted. He had gone into “forbidden zones” and cannot afford to be alone.
Hamilton creates living characters whom I really cared about as they attempt to negotiate the tangled webs that their personal relationships and social traditions appear to demand. There is always a satisfying mediation of the violence with irony and he writes the violent scenes with the accomplishment of a crime mystery master. There are some good surprises with the turns in the plot and his sense of the Irishness in both the characters, the social history and the landscape kept me intrigued all through the reading, even during the ten pages on Teddy's ice cream shop.
“Each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty” and here, “a true friend is somebody who would put his hand in the fire for you.” After Vid's initial fear of a barman using his knife to slice a lemon but also to wave near his face when giving directions, he begins his slow course of learning to cope with Irish pub culture and its incongruous combination of charm, apparent friendship, strange codes, drunkenness and raging, violent males. When Vid is bashed for talking outside with a rebellious daughter when her drunk, controlling father suddenly becomes the defender of her honour when he draws all the wrong conclusions, Vid really does need an Irish friend. Unfortunately, Kevin, who is a lawyer who has given Vid work restoring his mother's cottage, is also drunk and enraged at the father's attack. Violence is heaped upon violence and you can guess who ends up in court being prosecuted for attacking the father. The comedy is now dark indeed. Kevin advises Vid to say nothing to the police and is the one true friend that Vid needs desperately. The court case reminded me of Beckett whom Hamilton references several times about the darkness beneath Irish charm and the paralysis that people feel in the face of authority.
Vid begins to feel like a tied down Gulliver ensnared in the complications of owing Kevin, working in his mother's house and becoming involved with his family and the prospect of revenge being taken as a result of the pub bashing, revenge being something with which a young man fleeing Serbia during the war was all too well acquainted. He had gone into “forbidden zones” and cannot afford to be alone.
Hamilton creates living characters whom I really cared about as they attempt to negotiate the tangled webs that their personal relationships and social traditions appear to demand. There is always a satisfying mediation of the violence with irony and he writes the violent scenes with the accomplishment of a crime mystery master. There are some good surprises with the turns in the plot and his sense of the Irishness in both the characters, the social history and the landscape kept me intrigued all through the reading, even during the ten pages on Teddy's ice cream shop.
December 2, 2024
Le livre est excellent , il dépeint une société irlandaise en mutation mais encore ancrée dans ses traditions. Vid, un immigré serbe, se lie d'amitié avec un jeune avocat mais découvre un monde violent et exclusif dont il ne fait pas partie. C'est un roman émouvant.
April 13, 2023
I liked the premise here of an outsider, a Serbian immigrant, observing and telling the story of an Irish family. I wasn’t entirely convinced the relationship between Kevin and Vid was believable- at least not Kevin’s nasty manipulative behaviour.
May 31, 2020
A re-read. I am very divided over this book. On the one hand, what really sticks out is the voice of the 1st person narrator – the voice of the immigrant, a perpetual on-looker who observes, reflects and mimics his new country’s habits, idioms, social codes, and national traits which its citizens take for granted, hoping to blend in with his new environment, holding up the mirror to the readers, giving us food for thoughs concerning how we treat the new arrivals who are trying to eke out an existence amongst strangers. In this respect, it’s a very accomplished novel.
Also, every now and then, you find some very discerning comments by the writer about modern Irish society, how the past is lurking at every corner, inescapably shaping the present both as individuals and as a nation. The novel’s themes are very straightforward – immigration / exile, identity / memory, innocence / guilt, friendship / fraud, a sense of belonging / a metaphysical homelessness, and then there’s the theme of drowning.
However, I always felt there’s something lacking. Mostly, character development. Vid Cosic is our main character, but he is gullible beyond belief. (And how old is he, anyway?) His new bestie, Kevin Concannon, on the other hand, is one gigantic blur. Since the foil character is barely developed, the centre of the story remains void. An old, local story of a drowned woman is interwoven into the text, and I thought that it is going to build up to serve a purpose, that the novel would come up with some sort of a twist, but that never happens. The ending is rather vanilla.
Also, every now and then, you find some very discerning comments by the writer about modern Irish society, how the past is lurking at every corner, inescapably shaping the present both as individuals and as a nation. The novel’s themes are very straightforward – immigration / exile, identity / memory, innocence / guilt, friendship / fraud, a sense of belonging / a metaphysical homelessness, and then there’s the theme of drowning.
However, I always felt there’s something lacking. Mostly, character development. Vid Cosic is our main character, but he is gullible beyond belief. (And how old is he, anyway?) His new bestie, Kevin Concannon, on the other hand, is one gigantic blur. Since the foil character is barely developed, the centre of the story remains void. An old, local story of a drowned woman is interwoven into the text, and I thought that it is going to build up to serve a purpose, that the novel would come up with some sort of a twist, but that never happens. The ending is rather vanilla.
January 9, 2016
An insightful account of what it is like to be an immigrant in contemporary Ireland. Highlights how we sometimes treat non-nationals and yet have such a long tradition of immigration ourselves. Also highlights the prevalence of heavy alcohol consumption and drug abuse.
Altogether, not a very uplifting account of Ireland or the Irish people. I did not enjoy it as much as The Speckled People but nevertheless did think that it left me with a better understanding of minority groups and the challenges they face trying to integrate.
The main themes for me were, immigration, exile, memory and the narratives we construct for ourselves and others if they let. These narratives reflect our perception of our world and they can prove difficult to change or erase even when they prove false. Keeping secrets and guilt were also prominent themes as was substance abuse and post-traumatic stress.
The first chapter introduces us to friendship and how Irish people have a funny way of doing friendship. I certainly hope this is not the experience of other minority groups in this country-if so I would not like to see how we treat our enemies.
An engaging read but dark and without much hope that I could see. Would still read more of Hugo Hamilton but will not be rating this as one of my better reads so far this year.
Altogether, not a very uplifting account of Ireland or the Irish people. I did not enjoy it as much as The Speckled People but nevertheless did think that it left me with a better understanding of minority groups and the challenges they face trying to integrate.
The main themes for me were, immigration, exile, memory and the narratives we construct for ourselves and others if they let. These narratives reflect our perception of our world and they can prove difficult to change or erase even when they prove false. Keeping secrets and guilt were also prominent themes as was substance abuse and post-traumatic stress.
The first chapter introduces us to friendship and how Irish people have a funny way of doing friendship. I certainly hope this is not the experience of other minority groups in this country-if so I would not like to see how we treat our enemies.
An engaging read but dark and without much hope that I could see. Would still read more of Hugo Hamilton but will not be rating this as one of my better reads so far this year.
January 1, 2016
This was an excellent book, really more like 4.5 stars. I hope to teach it someday. Vid's experience as a Serbian immigrant in Ireland is so fascinating, especially how he wrestles with different types of Irish hospitality and friendship. I also loved the local legend of the drowned woman found on the Aran Islands and how it weaves into the text (though it felt a little forced at the end). Really, a lovely book.
July 23, 2016
Well written and as the cover suggests a contemplation on innocence and guilt. Interesting ideas of the innocence coming from Serbia in Ireland. Hamilton writes with deceptive simplicity and stunning observation of the simplest of things, for example the extended passage on the nature of the ice cream come. Not an author I have come across before, but one I will look out for.
February 4, 2014
This is my first time to read Hugo Hamilton and I just hope his other books are as good as 'Hand In The Fire' . . . I couldn't put it down and really missed it when I finished reading it. One of the best books I've read in recent years, couldn't recommend it highly enough!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews