It is so much easier to say nothing than to forget, observes a character in Louise Kennedy’s first novel. The phrase is true to a book whose meaningful forms are made from the desires of the body and not the distractions of speech. Trespasses begins and ends with a chance meeting before a sculpture cast from one of its characters, and the pages between are the story of a humanity that is frail flesh and bloodied bone, battered by ideology and violence.
Set on the margins of Belfast in an uncertain time late in the last century, Trespasses is a troubled fiction, intimate, observant and ironic. It is sensual too, and tragic, taut and unsparing of the binds that once held this fractured society in place.
The story revolves around the relationship between Cushla Lavery, a schoolteacher still living at home with her alcoholic mother and working part-time in the family pub, and Michael Agnew, an arts-loving barrister unbalanced by his life’s long middle stretch. Together the two give Trespasses its dark energy, its relentlessness, its tragedy and its release, the terrible declensions of northern society rewritten in the lovers’ bodies, their affair a dramatisation of all that might have been had we only the tenderness to brave it.
Kennedy draws the boundaries tight around her star-crossed pair, their momentary freedoms found on side roads and second homes, or in flight south across the Border. They bring their burdens with them, and Dublin is no escape, different but dour in its own way, the dingy corridors of the hotel patrolled by nuns silent in their disapproval, the receptionist offering a raised eyebrow in welcome to this unlikely pair.
In other novels, the relationship between Cushla and Michael, one young and one married, might be the cipher for some larger meaning such as reconciliation or cross-community understanding. Trespasses refuses false comfort, lying the reader down with the lovers in the wet gorse at night, or driving us through the cold docklands, the city a shroud under which its subjects sleep, restless. Kennedy attends instead to the minute movements of the lovers’ forms, the whole novel thrumming with desire, its physicality its rebuke to a culture that saw human life as secondary to the maintenance of some damaged normality.
The horror at the heart of all this is the degree to which so many of its characters accommodate themselves to this compromise. The policeman who humiliates Cushla smells faintly of mown grass, and the circle of liberal society around Michael is observed unsparingly, their determination to keep things going a complement to the monstrosity of the larger situation.
Throughout, Kennedy writes with fierce power; Trespasses is a prose machine that tests apparent forms of sincerity against the single principle of human solidarity.
Cushla is the ethical centre of the novel, and a model of compassionate risk. Her care for the most vulnerable of her young pupils causes her to lose her job and leads by coincidence to the tragedy that gives the novel its fatalistic shape. But there is no sense that she could do otherwise, as we can tell from her reaction to fellow teacher Gerry Devlin’s strategic renditions of Bridge Over Troubled Water.
Trespasses is not a polemical book, except by implication, Cushla and Michael the centre of a series of solidarities that are in opposition to all standing proprieties. Alcoholism and depression are the borderlands of this private world, silence and deception its sentinels. Within there are the small freedoms that mean everything, the whispered phone call, the stolen evening. All this plays out to a soundtrack of blues and lament, soulful refrains pitched against the harsh litanies of faith militant, in church or state.
Together Burns and Kennedy represent a turn in northern fiction towards freedoms their subjects could only ever carry in their heads
Kennedy writes this tangled world with unusual clarity, her tenderly sharpened prose open to feelings so presently intimate that her sentences take shape like a body beside you. Her art recognises its many relatives in the Irish and English languages in the books and songs her characters escape to, just as the novel’s division into discrete sections, such as “Dúil” and “Chiaroscuro”, echoes the construction of Ernie O’Malley’s great memoir of those earlier troubles, On Another Man’s Wound.
There are shades of John McGahern in Kennedy’s surgical decomposition of coincidence and its deathly operations, and of Ciaran Carson, the laureate of Belfast’s otherwise invisible cities. And it is hard too not to think of Anna Burns’s masterpiece, Milkman, as the nervous system to Kennedy’s bodily Trespasses.
The two works are their own independent constructions, but they speak to each other as aesthetic frequencies on the broad spectrum of our troubled past, the interior genius of Milkman made sensuous in Trespasses, the nameless named, the repressed desired. Together Burns and Kennedy represent a turn in northern fiction towards freedoms their subjects could only ever carry in their heads, a coming into language, sympathy and awareness that is preserve of the highest works of art.
That these novels are emerging now suggests another quality of this contemporary art, which is perseverance. Living now in the west of Ireland, Kennedy is part of a writing community that has many other lives to lead, and many responsibilities beyond the dogged work of finishing a sentence, a paragraph, one page and then another.
In the end, a novel stands alone, as Trespasses does magnificently. But in the balance we have found between war and peace it is worth considering that literature is one measure of our common ground, a refuge that is coda to the novel’s close, when leaving seems the only remedy.
The Northern diaspora is far-flung, for many reasons, but more than one reader will find some solace in the thought that such a book as this can be written, even after all. In the end, however, read this novel for what it is, and not for the past in which it is set. Insightful, humane and utterly determined to find its own freedoms, Trespasses is a bright flare of energy and wit, Kennedy a writer of exceptional empathy, style and skill.
