Review: Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Shortlisted for the 2023 Nota Bene Prize, Trespasses is a blistering account of encroaching violence and fractured loyalties in 1970's Belfast. Tender and devastating, this is an incredible debut novel from Louise Kennedy.
One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street. If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt.
There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever. As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead.
In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like 'petrol bomb' and 'rubber bullets'. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.
Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.
REVIEWED BY RUBY CONWAY
It is 1975 Belfast and 24-year-old Cushla Lavery, school-teacher, Catholic, and sometimes bartender at the family pub (largely frequented by British soldiers), leads a steady humdrum life characterised by work and looking after her alcoholic mother. The violence of The Troubles is there, at every corner and turn, but it has taken on the greyness of the fabric of daily life - ordinary, at stretches. It has, alarmingly, infiltrated the daily existence of school children: ‘Booby trap. Incendiary device. Gelignite. Nitroglycerine. Petrol bomb. Rubber bullets. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act. Vanguard. The vocabulary of a 7-year-old child now.’ The novel keenly captures a realist sense of the city at this time, how it is to drive around its roads and checkpoints, the characters of the pub locals, the partisan details of everyday life, the staunch community divides.
It is early on in the novel that Cushla meets Michael, a prominent Protestant Barrister, married, and an “ould lad” who was once an acquaintance of her recently deceased Father. Cushla begins teaching Michael and his liberal, bourgeois Protestant friends Irish, in scenes that edge on uncomfortable, something sacrificed by Cushla for her place at their dinner table as what often feels like the token Catholic. Cushla and Michael’s relationship feels inevitable and foreboding, all-consuming and full of a dangerous kind of passion.
It is Cushla’s maternal relationship with one of her students, Davy, that is perhaps more intensely moving than her love story with Michael though. Following a near-fatal attack on Davy’s father, Cushla provides a helping hand to the family, whose lives, living as they do as Catholics on a majority-Protestant estate, are far from easy. It is the love she shows Davy that comes to be just as contemptuous and stirring in the community as her hidden relationship with Michael is, and the two arcs inextricably and fatally work their way together.
Trespasses is a locally detailed and keenly felt depiction of a certain period of Irish history, moving in its resilience and kindness, and emotive in its inevitabilities and acceptances rather than by loud exclamations.