Review by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Louise Kennedy’s talent seems to flood effortlessly from her fingertips. I adored her short story collection, The End of The World is a Cul-de-Sac. And now, her first novel, Trespasses, has knocked me over completely.
The story is set in nineteen-seventies Belfast, shining on that time and place a light that’s tender and stark, compassionate and shocking. It’s about ordinary people, doing their best to go about their lives while suffering silently behind closed doors, denying their pain, suppressing their damage, reaching day after day for some sense of normality on this backdrop of division and violence. Kennedy’s intelligent, observant sensibilities set her sentences alight, holding her scenes in a kind of stoic tension. She marshals every word with a kind of urgency and intensity characteristic of the time in which it’s set.
There’s genius in the juxtaposition of the brutal and the banal: The news headlines announcing attacks, beatings, explosions and deaths in one breath while in the next, telling of the postponement of a horserace due to inclement weather. She reveals with tactful insight the ways in which people in war-zones normalise the violence that’s happening around them. Moments of dark humour, of fleeting, undiscussed references to trauma, the shrugging off or batting away of emotion – these depict the brutalised stoicism of a people under fire.
Kennedy pulls you in with a sure hand and a meticulous eye. We learn or are reminded of important aspects of Belfast’s past: The underground river that the city is named after, how children in the Divis flats were often sleepy at school on account of the night-time helicopter beams that shone through their windows; how wedding receptions routinely were interrupted by army raids.
This is an Ireland in which women can lose their jobs for living with their partners while unmarried, where women prepare and serve the food and clear and clean afterwards while their men sip whiskey and talk around the table (‘every time I see you you’re in an apron’ Cushla observes of a female friend. In another scene she kisses her lover’s shoulder, butters his toast, pours his tea. ‘You pair… a word,’ Cushla’s brother says at one point, to his mother and his sister while wagging his finger in authoritarian disapproval. Quite early in the novel, there’s reference to the now famous interview with Michael Parkinson and Helen Mirren. It’s perfectly chosen, showing how easily a respected role model of the establishment can legitimise gender-based diminishment and dismissal.)
Everything about Kennedy’s writing does glorious, unsettling justice to the story she’s telling. Her Brennan-esque animation of inanimate objects is another example of the subtlety of her brilliance: Fire alarms bleat, buses sigh, there is a ‘suck’ and a ‘dunt’ to the opening and closing of a fridge door. Even glasses, plonked a certain way on a counter can sound irritated.
The purity of her craft is a joy to read. But more than anything, it’s the vividness and truth of Kennedy’s characters that has had the greatest impact on me: Gina, whose damage and drunkenness hides her generous heart and who grapples silently with her own painful history; the chilling Fr Slattery who makes a fetish of his own hatred relishing the ruination of children’s sense of safety, seven year old Davy, enchanting and delightful, and his troubled family, Cushla's best friend Gerry, faithful and decent, Michael and his friends who despite their privilege cannot remain neutral or immune.
And Cushla, oh Cushla - at the centre of it all constrained and silenced by so much, longing to break free, to defy and confront her destiny and the destinies of those she cares about. She’s full of guilt and anger, honesty and deceit, courage and contradictions. She’s fully believable She’s flawed. She’s heroic. She is magnificent.