Lukas Dorn, the central character of Hugo Hamilton’s new novel, talks to the sea and the sea talks back to him. Recently separated from his wife, Katia, who has remained in Berlin, he has returned to the site of their honeymoon in the west of Ireland in the hope that things might happen – which, in due course, they do. Late one night, he frightens a horse; he has awkward conversations with his ‘quite motherly’ landlady; he goes for a walk to the bog; the horse he frightened appears to go crazy and has to be rescued from the sea. Otherwise, he mopes around, wishing for the appearance of his estranged wife, who left him to pursue a career as an artist. 

It soon becomes evident that Lukas’s experiences and ruminations possess an allegorical significance. Lukas is caught up in the past. He keeps a journal religiously, ‘as though his mind would fall apart if he didn’t lay out the facts in contemporaneous order’. The practice was instilled in him by his father, who bought him a notebook and ‘taught him how to put his fears’ into it. We are told that he can’t remember a single dream or nightmare from the last ten years, as if he’s ‘afraid of his own memory’. Yet almost everything at the beach reminds him of his honeymoon – he sees ‘the spot where he had once stood with Katia in a copper glow with the sun setting’. 

Early in the novel, we learn that Lukas’s father was a history professor who studied the Nazis’ erasure of evidence of the Holocaust. He drilled his children to bear witness. His mother, whose family had been killed by the Nazis, was terrified of ‘what you might be forced to witness’