Throughout the novel,The Hired Man, Aminatta Forna tells a contemporary story about a town and its people who are very much still living with the past. Duro Kolak, the narrator of the story, and handyman of the town of Gost tells the story of a single summer through a journal he wrote shortly after the events. He retells the story of that summer in the past tense, but his writing is peppered with visions of the past, told in the present tense. Forna introduces readers to the dark history of the town through these visions, which emphasizes how trapped Duro is in the events of his past, and gives the stories he tells an ominous urgency to them. Because they are told as if they are happening in front of our very eyes, yet managing to follow Duro and his childhood friend Anka throughout their entire young lives, we are left wondering why these stories hold as much importance as they seem to, and where Anka is to be found in the present day journal we are reading the story through. The personal histories of Duro, Anka, Kreshmir, and Fabian are inextricable from the larger history of the Bosnian War, and the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the ethnic tension between the Serbs in Croatia and the non-Serbian Croats. Forna uses the unique dialects of the two ethnic groups to allude to the ethnic tension between the groups. Forna weaves in the tension between these two groups slowly and subtly, the most overt example being the sign hung on the bakery window, with ‘Hleb,’ the serbo-croatian word for bread crossed out and replaced with ‘Kruh,’ the Czech equivalent.
Duro is a forty six year old handyman who was born and raised in Gost. Although he spent soem of his adult life traveling and working by the seaside, he feels like a permanent fixture of the town, and clearly feels an obligation to preserve its history through the detailed journal he kept. Laura, a middle-aged woman from England, purchases the house next door to Duro, and summers there with her son and daughter. Laura seems to be looking for some escape from her life in England, perhaps to bring her blended family together, helping Max and Connor bond, or to break from the structure of her regular life. With Connor stopping by infrequently, and Max being distant and moody, the reader gets the impression that Laura is looking for emotional intimacy, and finds some version of that with Duro. Although initially Duro paints himself as the kind of person that relishes his solitude, he realizes that after spending so much time with Laura and her family, it starts to feel strange when he’s alone. In this way both Laura and Duro are seeking a form of intimacy with each other, although Duro clearly envisions a sexual/romantic relationship with her. While Laura shares a lot with Duro about her relationship with her children, her insecurities, and her feelings, Duro does not reciprocate often. He seems to display the intimacy he feels for her by going above and beyond on projects around her house, buying her gifts, engaging with her children, and acting at the family’s ‘protector’ by spending several nights on the couch when Laura was feeling unsafe. Laura’s impact on Duro can be seen pretty clearly throughout the book. As he spends more and more time with her family, his unresolved feelings for Anka become more and more apparent. Duro takes the feelings out on Laura, by turing her into version of Anka. As he gets farther along on restoring the house that Anka once lived in, his descriptions of Laura start sounding more and more like his descriptions of Anka. While Laura does help Duro engage with the present in some ways, she also digs up much of his past. Duro helps Laura move from the bubbly, naive tourist she was at the begging of the book to a more nuanced character who better understood the complexities of her surroundings.
Forna chose to structure the book like a journal written by Duro after the summer when Laura and her family moved to town. This journal is written in the past tense, except for when Duro talks about the distant past, and his childhood and young adulthood with Anka, Kreshmir, and Fabjan. She may have chosen to structure it in this way to highlight the way that Duro is constantly reliving his history, trapped in the guilt he feels over Anka’s disappearance, and the repressed anger he carries towards Kreshmir and Fabjan. The combination of the first person and the present tense makes the reader feel as if they are with Duro, seeing it through his eyes. Duro’s flashbacks