DUBLIN PALMS

by Hugo Hamilton

(4th Estate £14.99, 288 pp) THE Irish writer Hugo Hamilton is best known for his bestselling memoir The Speckled People. In it, he detailed the traumatic impact of growing up in Ireland, where his mother was German and his father a native Irish speaker and devout nationalist who forbade him from speaking English.

That personal experience exists just below the surface of this novel, which is about a man of similar parentage to Hamilton struggling to establish a yoga business with his wife in Eighties Dublin.

The narrator sometimes has problems speaking at all, and a fair deal of the novel is taken up with the question of what it means to be understood in a city where personal identity is inextricably politicised. The notion of home itself, in a city people are either emigrating from or returning to, is also complicated.

But it’s also a pretty convoluted novel that gets too bogged down in the narrator’s introspective musings on words and meaning. There’s an irony there.