Book Review: Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, a "love story in the time of the troubles"

Isabel Conway explores the Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, which centers on "some of the darkest days on this island"

The backdrop for Louise Kennedy’s debut novel centres on some of the darkest days on this island.

 ‘BOOBY TRAP. Incendiary device. Gelignite. Nitroglycerine. Petrol Bomb. Rubber bullets. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act. Vanguard.’

The vocabulary of a seven-year-old child during the seventies era of the Northern Ireland Troubles in recently graduated teacher Cushla’s class has a grotesque fictional resonance now.

But it is one all too familiar to those who remember news reports describing unspeakable tragedies, a never ending spiral of violence that went on for decades, north of the border.

The backdrop for Louise Kennedy’s debut novel centres on some of the darkest days on this island, one in which ordinary lives were altered, often by force of circumstances, forever.

Despite the grim, unyielding background Trespasses remains a beautifully crafted love story that doesn’t miss a beat, whose chemistry is intense and passionate, jumping off the page, sparks flying.

Kennedy is the ultimate storyteller. Her characters are skilfully crafted, utterly believable from start to finish and the plot keeps the reader intimately engaged wanting things to end differently but knowing it cannot be so.

Some chapters begin with the latest atrocity, to shocking effect: “Two Catholic civilians were shot dead in a house in Mount Vernon in the north of the city. The Protestant Action Force has claimed responsibility.”; “Three hundred pound car bomb exploded outside the Lyric Theatre, causing extensive damage to the rear of the building. No one was injured.”

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Seamie McGeown, a Catholic father is beaten to pulp in a random attack for taking the wrong lane home, Protestant neighbours terrorise the only Catholic family of a mixed marriage in a rundown estate covered in union jack bunting where the ‘taigs’ are under continual siege: Dog turds hurled at their washing line and vile abuse for protestant mother Betty who is bringing her kids up Catholics. Later on a visit to their home Cushla looks at Seamie. “The swelling had gone down and one side of his face had fallen, where the eye socket had been cracked. He reminded her of one of those Picassos, where a face had been disassembled and its features redistributed.”

Lives interweave, caught amid injustice, bad luck, and mayhem, struggling for survival. Yet kindness and normality shines out here and there amid the warlike rawness of the landscape, one Kennedy knows well having grown up a few miles outside Belfast during the Troubles.

Cushla Lavery, a 24-year-old Catholic primary schoolteacher was a child when religious bigotry and tribalism existed but people weren’t yet killing one another.

Bombings and beatings, sectarian murders and feuds are the nightly news feed, among the miserable vacant lots lies caged buildings, road blocks and hoardings that warn ‘don’t let the bomber get your car’; ‘don’t let children play with toy guns’ ,and ‘if you’re suspicious dial 999’.

We enter the action on Ash Wednesday after Cushla’s forehead has been marked with a thick cross of ashes. Her brother Eamonn runs the family pub in a garrison town near Belfast. Protestants, Press Button B’s (Presbyterians) RUC officers, and off-duty British soldiers drink in it side by side with a smattering of Catholics. A few of the paras like grinding cigarette butts into the carpet and one gropes Cushla who helps behind the bar. Eamonn knows the tightrope pub landlords like himself walk. He juggles the balls, telling Cushla to clean “the papist war paint … off her face ... muttering something under his breath … the only word she could make out was eejit”. From early on there is a sense that doom on many fronts is looming.

“My brother stands behind the bar every night afraid to open his mouth in case he offends somebody and ends up on a loyalist hit list,” Cushla explains on a rare party night out in Belfast student land. On their way Gerry, her teacher friend, has had a rifle landed in the centre of his back during an army search of their car. The joys of socialising in Belfast during the Troubles.

From the very first pages Kennedy’s characters and brutally honest prose, racy and profound with much black humour, holds the reader captive.

Bloomsbury Circus (£14.99)