BOOK REVIEW : ‘Last Shot’: Looking at Historic Moment in Terms of the Past : THE LAST SHOT<i> by Hugo Hamilton</i> ; Farrar, Straus & Giroux $20; 175 pages

1945. It is a hinge of history. German power is collapsing, and in the East, Soviet power moves to take its place. The map is about to be re-drawn for more than 45 years. Then, of course, the re-drawing will smudge and fade.

Hugo Hamilton, a young Irish writer of partly German parentage, hasn’t much use for history’s hinges. They work loose. Hitler’s empire fell and another totalitarian empire moved in. The Berlin Wall fell, and West Germans, in the name of their grandfathers, are evicting East Germans from the homes they have lived in for more than a generation.

Perhaps something is more important than the peaks history throws up: Perhaps it is the life that lives on them, turns rock to soil and wears them down.

“The Last Shot” is an odd and oddly moving novel about history’s erosion. It is spare, quietly and dryly voiced, and the quiet voice is deceptive; persuading our attention, it can suddenly command it.

“The Last Shot” looks at a present historic moment in terms of a past one, by means of two stories. One is told by an American who returns in 1990 to Germany, where he had studied five years earlier, to look for a man who may have been his father. He takes up with his two closest friends from student days: Anke, who had been his lover, and Jurgen, the medical student she went on to marry.

They are prosperous but shadowed. Their baby, who has Downs syndrome, stands for a deeper unsoundness: a guilt of time and place, of having escaped, by their generation, the horror and guilt of Nazism and, by their geography, the oppression of their countrymen, suddenly visible through the crumbled Wall.

The tone is overheated and filled with unease. There is erotic tension; the narrator and Anke take up their affair again. Jurgen confronts them and forgives them in the same breath; they are all civilized and high-minded.

By the same token, they acquiesce when the baby develops leukemia and Jurgen decides to painlessly hasten matters. They agonize, genuinely, but there seems to be no good argument against the decision; just as there seemed to be no good reason for the West Germans not to accept their good fortune.

Quietly, as if opening a gas-cock, Hamilton steeps us in claustrophobia:

“Another feeble wintry evening. Kitchen windows begin to steam up. . . . TVs came on. Cartoons. News. Football results. People all over Germany sealed into their own luck.”

All this, set in the present, is foreground. But what gives “The Last Shot” its distinction is its backlighting. This comes from the second story, set in 1945; as fresh, agile and unfettered as the first story is oppressive. The two are told in brief alternating passages; a link is hinted but will be made only at the end.

Hitler is dead and the German high command has surrendered, but Czechoslovakia remains a no-man’s land. The German commander in Prague continues to fight the partisans and hang deserters; the Soviet forces are still advancing and the Americans, at Pilsen, have orders not to move.

In the village of Laun, the local German commandant awaits instructions. The village resistance also waits for instructions. The men gather at the barber’s.

“They felt the silent, reflective moment that all men feel before their turn comes up in the barber shop, the moment preceding change,” Hamilton writes, suggesting what history’s hinge looks like in a sleepy village. Eventually, the men will telephone the barracks requesting a surrender, the commandant will eventually receive his orders and the garrison will more or less peacefully head for the German border.

Two of them, however, have taken matters in their own hands. Franz Kern, an officer, had for some time respectfully admired Bertha Sommer, the single civilian employee in the garrison. He produces two bicycles and convinces her that they can get home by going across country and avoiding the jammed and dangerous roads.

Their journey is an innocent idyll, though with its share of hardship and danger. At one point, Bertha is attacked by two Poles making their way East; Franz shoots them and saves her. It is the war’s “last shot,” fired for the least grandiose and most human of reasons: to defend a loved one. History’s hinge again, corroded.

Hamilton evokes the couple’s journey away from the marching and fleeing armies with a lyrical sense of the German landscape’s abiding beauty. Franz, who is married, is gentle and reflective; Bertha is methodical and conscientious, taking special pains to wash her feet whenever possible.

Their unavowed mutual passion is reined in, comically and touchingly; and when it is consummated, it is a comic and touching explosion. For the weeks they travel, it is as if the world had just been created and were all theirs. They make plans to go to America together. But when they find Franz’s wife in the ruins of Nuremberg, her astonished joy is too much for them. Franz will stay; Bertha will go to America alone.

The story of Franz and Bertha, artfully suggestive and understated, is an instructive delight in itself. Its wry and innocent decency serves, furthermore, to illuminate the clogged and overnourished lives of Anke, Jurgen and the narrator 45 years later. The separateness of the two stories is sometimes awkward, but there is a note of reconciliation in the long conversation at the end between the narrator and the father he had left America to find: Franz, now in his 70s.