Book Thoughts: Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (2022)

Cushla is 24, a school teacher, and living with her alcoholic mother during the height of the Troubles in a small town outside of Belfast. She helps out her brother who owns a bar frequented by protestants although they are catholic. The father of one of her students is brutally beaten, as he’s a catholic who married a protestant and they receive prejudice and hatred from both sides.

This sounds like an interesting or at least nuanced premise, but unfortunately the main crux of the novel is taken up with the (at least it seemed to me) purely physical relationship Cushla has with a mid-fifties married protestant man. I am not inherently against tales of infidelity, or exploring age gap relationship. but at this point, it’s gotta have something interesting to say about those topics to get me interested. I’ve read at least one too many stories about a young woman sleeping with an older married man to really care about this one, even though there is an added class and religion dynamic.

The problem is that Cushla does not have any personality, no character traits or revealing relationships to speak of. The only thing identifiable about her mother is that she’s drunk. The only thing we know about her brother is that he’s married and owns a bar. The only thing we know about her father is that he’s dead. She has one friend who also works at the school with her but it’s really unclear why they get along other than the fact that they keep showing up in scenes together, nothing about what she actually thinks about him. (But don’t worry, we eventually learn that he is gay! so that makes him interesting.) She never has any friends or even people who she used to be friends in school who she’s not close to now. In other words for a small town, she really doesn’t know anyone.

There might be a reason for this, especially with the bifurcated nature of the town during the extremely political tumult of the troubles. But, I am not going to assume everything here. You’ve got to tell me something. Not everything can be off the page.

Speaking of off the page, we get no indication of why she is so obsessed with this fifty year old guy other than the fact that he was wearing a white shirt the first time they met. I don’t mind her being attracted to someone older or even her sleeping with someone married but at least let me understand the reason, be on her side, see how she actually feels about it. When I’m just watching it happen from the outside, it’s pretty boring. 1

One aspect I found pretty clever is the way she opens some chapters. The head of her school makes her ask the students for the daily news at the beginning of class. Here’s the opening of chapter 11.

The Secretary of State says the recent spate of killings in the west of the city is part of an internal Republican feud and insists the IRA truce is still in place.

The Protestant Action Force has claimed responsibility for the shooting dead of two men in a bar in the New Lodge area.

“Bye Bye Baby” is still number one.

My daddy’s getting better, said Davy. The others were taking out their books and did not appear to have heard.

She gave them a spelling test and confused them by calling out the same list of words twice. (etc.)

I really like what this does, giving us a sense of the overarching violence and tumult, but also the rote and routine nature of the horror, the way even the children have begun to be desensitized to it. Also a great way to move facets of the plot along, give us information about the characters mixed in with the general news. I think that what’s great about it is that just listing things out in the narration by itself would feel a bit much, but putting it into the mouths of her elementary school students and transitioning right into a classroom scene after starting the chapter with a list does something interesting to the way you read both the information and the following scene.

Other than that, there’s this convenient thing where the two main strands of the story - her relationship with the older guy, and her relationship with her student and his family - converge right at the climax of the story. Made me feel like that was the only narrative reason that the author even included the family in the first place, because up until then both storylines really didn’t seem to go together. At least not as the only two facets of this girl’s entire life.