Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Review by Cath Barton
‘God did this, you know, he said. Put you in front of me when I’ve nothing to offer you.’
Those who trespass in places where they should not go are punished by the Gods. So the Greek myths tell us. It is 1975, and the children in Cushla Lavery’s class in a garrison town near Belfast recount items from the news before lessons every morning, familiar at seven years old with the vocabulary of the Troubles. In the bar run by her brother where Cushla helps out in the evenings, she meets a man. Cushla is twenty-four, Michael Agnew twice her age; she is Catholic, he a Protestant and, according to Cushla’s mother when she tells her about him that evening, ‘a ladykiller in his day’. He is also married.
Michael is a barrister; he is not sectarian, has spoken out against internment. He has about him, Cushla says, something, ‘that made you want to be better than you were’. In his flat she sees a translation he has written of the Irish word Dúil – ‘desire, liking, fondness, craving. Yearning? Want?’ It could be a definition of their burgeoning relationship. But there is pain, too, symbolised by the recurring image and symbolism of the gorse: flowers Michael picks for Cushla to dye eggs golden at Easter, but which have thorns that leave her palm ‘dented with red dashes’ like stigmata. Later in the story the flowers have deepened to a yellow that is ‘almost sulphurous’.
The story that Louise Kennedy tells, so deftly, in Trespasses is one of people straying into dangerous territory — not just Michael and Cushla’s affair, but also her befriending of Davy, a boy from her class, and her attempts to help his family. The reader perhaps knows things can only end badly, just not how or when, or indeed the full extent of it. Kennedy sweeps us along in a story that is not simply one of cause and effect; there is randomness that enters into the events too, making them all the more tragic. She shows powerfully the collateral damage of sectarian violence to people who wish no part in it. The characters of Cushla and her frequently drunken mother are particularly vividly drawn. Michael is more enigmatic and withheld — frustratingly and annoyingly to Cushla and the reader alike — but, as Cushla herself describes him on their first meeting, ‘solid, substantial’ and fatally attractive. After the success of Kennedy’s short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, this is a hugely satisfying long-form debut from an increasingly essential writer.