Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Crossing lines…

😀 😀 😀 😀

In a small town just outside Belfast at the height of the Troubles, Cushla teaches primary school children by day and helps out in her brother’s pub by night. As a Catholic family amid a Protestant majority, Cushla’s family have learned to keep a neutral profile, tolerating the soldiers who come into the bar blustering and bullying in their youthful arrogance. But when Cushla meets Michael Agnew, she finds herself crossing social and cultural lines, and that can be dangerous in a society divided by fear and hate…

Kennedy does a great job of evoking her setting, showing the dividing lines, the “occupying” or “peace-keeping” army depending on perspective, the poverty and the fear. The love affair between Cushla and Michael is also completely credible – this young woman who falls for an older, married man. Her writing is excellent – descriptive without being “creative” or overly flowery, and she avoids the mawkishness that often comes with stories set in such tragic times. Her characters manage to live their lives almost normally for the most part, even finding some fun along the way. But she also shows how easy it is for people, especially boys and young men, to get caught up in extremism, and how their acts ripple out to destroy their families and wider communities. And Cushla’s transgression, minor though it would be considered in a time of peace and in a modern society, hits against the excessive moral outrage of a society that uses religion as its excuse for its violence.

Lots to love, therefore, in this one, and I quite see why so many people have indeed loved it. For my taste, however, the love affair got far more attention than it should have, and the politics were relegated too far into the background. While very credibly done, to me the love affair was banal and uninteresting. Young woman falls for much older married man and, surprise, surprise, discovers she’s not his first adulterous relationship. I didn’t find Michael particularly charismatic – Kennedy has her characters mention that he’s gorgeous several times, possibly in an attempt to justify why this attractive and independent-minded young woman should turn herself into his sex toy, but I didn’t feel that would have been enough to dazzle the Cushla we get to know. Sure, Michael talks to her about books and art occasionally, but mostly they meet, have hurried and often sordid sex, and then part. Of course it happens in real life, which is why I say it’s credible. But is it interesting? Not to me, sadly.

Louise Kennedy

The politics are ever present, and do play a part in the story eventually. But for the most part, we don’t really get involved. I wondered why Kennedy set it outside Belfast where the Troubles were a little more distanced, rather than in the city itself. And I felt that it would have been a more interesting plot if either Cushla or Michael had been more actively partisan. Michael is slightly connected to the political world, in that he’s a barrister defending young men accused of involvement in the violence, but this aspect is referred to rather than shown. We don’t see him in action or meet his clients or their victims. Cushla and her family are more interested in staying out of trouble than winning, and I suspect that is probably always true of most people caught up in civil conflicts. So again I couldn’t fault the credibility, but it left the story feeling monotone – until close to the end nothing much happens apart from the affair, and even the events at the end seemed rather muted in terms of the tragedies that we know happened daily in Northern Ireland at that time. Kennedy has a habit of skipping things as they happen, and then telling them in retrospect; for example, she will start a chapter by making reference to something that has happened since the last chapter that the reader wasn’t present for. I found that prevented the emotional involvement that I was longing to feel. It may be voyeuristic, but reading about an event as if it is happening now is always more involving than being told about it as something that is already over.

Far too much criticism for a book that I enjoyed overall. I think the reason I’m being so hard on it is that I felt it was so close to being wonderful, and yet just missed. Had the love affair been more passionate, the drama more dramatic or the tragedy more tragic, then the story would have matched the excellence of the setting and characterisation. As it is, it left me admiring but largely unmoved.

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