His father is a heavy-handed Irish chauvinist who forbids his children to speak English in the house. The child Hugo imagines the dead whispering ceaselessly in their graves, holding sway over the living. Hugo Hamilton's first memoir, The Speckled People, was all about festering secrets and guilt-ridden histories. We have seen several examples of such false awakening in Northern Ireland over the past few decades. James Joyce's hero Stephen Dedalus declares that he is trying to awake from the nightmare of history but the worst nightmare of all is to think you have woken up only to find that you haven't. For all their hard-headedness, the Protestant ascendency which governed Ireland for two centuries were a remarkably spooky bunch, as WB Yeats's dabbling in ghouls and demons bears witness. The author of the greatest book of the undead, Dracula, was a Dublin civil servant. The past in Ireland refuses a decent burial instead, it preys on the living in the monstrous form of the undead. Gothic's fascination with ruins and ancient crimes, spying priests and bloodstained histories, is tailor-made for the place. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history. Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities.
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