Louise Kennedy's TRESPASSES (Fiction Review)

When I mentioned I was reading a book set around Belfast in the 1970s, multiple friends replied, “Let me guess, a Catholic falls in love with a Protestant.” And in the case of Louise Kennedy’s 2022 debut novel, Trespasses, I had to reply, “Well, yes.” But for a text billed as essentially a love story set during The Troubles, I hesitate to even call it a romance, because the love story, while propelling much of the novel’s action, is not particularly what the book is about, nor particularly what the book is interested in. Same goes with The Troubles. While the book is highly evocative of this specific time and place, the war zone affecting Kennedy’s characters at every turn, the novel is not particularly interested in the timeline of historical markers or the political expediencies of The Troubles either.

Trespasses is the story of 24-year-old Cushla Lavery, a young Catholic woman who works alternately as a schoolteacher and a barmaid, living just outside Belfast in 1975 with her alcoholic and recently widowed mother. While working one day in the bar her brother runs and inherited from their recently deceased father, Cushla is swept up by one Michael Agnew, a Protestant lawyer and old acquaintance of her father’s.

Michael Agnew, while clearly a charmer, a successful professional, and a man of deep moral values (womanizing aside), does not seem particularly compelling; even Cushla, though obsessively in love with him, appears to feel somewhat ambivalent to him as a person. As a reader, you get the sense that of course this relationship is doomed and will not last, but also that this will be a but a blip on the screen of Cushla’s life — at 24, she has much more life to live. The framing of the novel itself alerts us to the fact that she has a lot more that happens in her life — the novel opens in the year 2015 as Cushla is examining an art exhibit. By novel’s end it is revealed that she has been married for some time, has multiple children and grandchildren. So then why does Kennedy focus so narrowly on this chapter of Cushla’s life? Why has this affair been selected as the snapshot Kennedy gives us into the life of our protagonist?

The narrative structure of the affair may suggest to a reader that this book is about relationships. While Michael and Cushla’s sexual and romantic relationship drives the action and therefore sits at the forefront, this alerts us too to the other relationships at play throughout the story, and specifically, the ones that are present at all points in the book — the 1970s and 2015. The relationships that hold throughout time are those of Cushla and Michael, of course; Cushla and Davy, a young student of Cushla’s from a mixed-religion household; and Cushla and Gerry, her coworker at the school, performative boyfriend, and secretly queer man. It is interesting that the relationships Cushla maintains throughout her lifetime are not those given to her in the family (the 2015 chapters mention nothing of what becomes of Cushla’s mother or brother), nor those formed of sexual or romantic connection (which, of course, are doomed), but rather those that are established in the bounds of the institution of her job at the school, which is necessarily filtered through the institution of the church.  

The threat of the church as institution looms large in the novel through the visage of the character of Father Slattery. Slattery threatens Cushla with losing her job at one point and takes an unsettling interest in Davy as a young boy — sexual abuse alluded to but not explicitly stated. Cushla is frequently shown to intercept Slattery’s special interest in Davy, and she comes to be punished for it.

And perhaps this relates to some of what drives Cushla’s interest in Michael Agnew — his brazen (and dangerous) defense of young Catholic boys, even as a Protestant himself, is brave and admirable, undeniably — he defends his “opposite” in the ongoing conflict, at personal risk to himself. Cushla wants to defend young Davy from the institution of the church but is limited in her ability to do so, especially as a young unwed Catholic woman in this time and this place.

This is exemplified at the outset from the way Kennedy introduces her characters in the book’s first chapter. We first meet Michael Agnew at Cushla’s family’s bar, where she comes to work on Ash Wednesday. Father Slattery has literally marked her with the sign of the cross in ashes upon her forehead — a mark her brother angrily insists she wipe off, lest they lose business by marking themselves as too Catholic. The bar is also where occupying British soldiers sexually assault Cushla while she is working. Michael Agnew is the one brave enough (or perhaps he simply has enough social and political capital) to defend Cushla – something her brother is unable to do, again, in service to the economic aims of the family business.

In a book that is ostensibly a love story set during a time of war, why do I feel like the novel is not particularly about either of these subjects: love or war?

Set in Belfast – but it’s not! Kennedy makes a point at multiple times throughout the text (and many of the marketing and blurbs surrounding the book make a point to assert this as well) that this book takes place in a town several miles outside Belfast. Which raises the question: Why set a story in 1975 around Belfast but not in Belfast? Well, perhaps the book is asking you to pay attention to what happens at the periphery of the action: this isn’t a story about the clash of political factions in the heart of the city; it’s a story about the ordinary people affected in extremely ordinary ways by the endurance of the war surrounding them, the ripple effect of conflict in terms physical, and perhaps more nefarious. If the propelling force of this story is the romance between Cushla Lavery and Michael Agnew, what occurs at the edge of that story that Kennedy wants readers to pay attention to?

There are a few answers to that. The obvious is Cushla’s relationship with Davy McGeown and his family, though that could arguably be considered the story’s central action as well. Look further out: Cushla’s relationship with Father Slattery. Or Cushla’s relationship with Gerry Devlin. Or Cushla’s relationship with the artist, Michael Agnew’s friend, Penny.  

Cushla and Gerry occupy many roles for each other throughout the novel, first colleagues, then romantic partners, then close friends. It is revealed in the segments of the book depicting Cushla in 2015 that she remains close with Gerry, and that he is queer. It seems a curious afterthought for a book so rooted in political and religious divisions and dire consequences for all of those. I do not believe Kennedy inserts that information into the text lightly. There is a sense throughout the novel that Cushla knows this, yet it is never stated explicitly until the end. One might consider this pure reciprocity (Cushla needed a cover for her relationship with Michael Agnew, and Gerry needed a cover for his sexuality – both, notably, illicit sexual activities quite punishable in their communities) but the maintenance of their friendship over several following decades would suggest something deeper binding them together. Surely not just trauma bonding? Though, if so, what is Kennedy suggesting about the endurance of relationships throughout war? The act of covering for each other under threat of professional destruction, or worse, is curious as well; it evokes the sense of undercover operation necessary for many during The Troubles.

Cushla and Penny are not an immediately obvious pairing for relational examination in this text, though Penny is one of the few characters featured in the parts of the book set in 2015: Penny is the artist whose work, a sculptural piece depicting the body of Michael Agnew, purportedly made in remembrance of him after his murder, is on display as Cushla reunites with Davy McGeown for the first time in decades. So what exactly is their relationship? Penny is the host of many of the “Irish language” parties Cushla attends in some of her only public appearances with Michael Agnew. Penny is not particularly kind or welcoming to Cushla (or perhaps that is just Cushla’s warped perspective — the cultural divisions present coloring Cushla’s understanding of their interactions), but Kennedy does convey some semblance of camaraderie between the two: they connect, if for no other reason, over their care for Michael. And this endures through Penny’s sculpture and Cushla’s examination of it. While Penny publicizes the sculpture as an “Everyman” casualty of The Troubles, Cushla immediately recognizes otherwise: The detail conveyed is “intimate, accurate even, almost as if the cast had been moulded over his body.” The details convey great tenderness, and though Michael Agnew is described as a charmer and all-about womanizer, it is not suggested in the text that Penny and he are lovers, though of course a sexual or romantic liaison between them would not be a stretch. Cushla, to her credit, does not appear to experience any jealousy in recognizing this familiarity between the artist and the subject’s body; she merely recognizes Michael, a result of her own close experience with his body.

Cushla also occupies a unique position at the periphery of age: Kennedy’s placement of her protagonist as specifically 24 demands interpretation. Cushla is at the cusp of adulthood, but still very recently a girl. She is regularly spending time with people significantly older than she, such as her mother, or of course Michael Agnew and his friends. And besides Gerry Devlin, her coworker, she does not seem to have many friends her own age. In some ways Cushla appears to have more in common with the McGeown children than with any of the adults she is associating with — and this line is drawn starker by the crush Tommy McGeown appears to have on Cushla. While Cushla views him as a mere boy, he is less than a decade younger than she, as opposed to Michael Agnew, who is more than twice her age, and it is intimated that this perhaps motivates Tommy’s killing of Michael. When first Tommy meets Cushla, Davy reveals that Cushla’s mother is incapacitated (drunk), and shortly after their first meeting, Tommy’s father is near fatally beaten. Tommy must absorb the role of man of the house. Perhaps Tommy recognizes a kinship with Cushla here that Cushla cannot see — the other adults in this story knew an adult life well before The Troubles, but Cushla, Tommy, and the other children Cushla teaches are coming of age amidst this violence, which fosters a very different generation of Northern Irish. As Cushla acknowledges in class one morning with her students, “Booby trap. Incendiary device…Petrol bomb…The vocabulary of a seven-year-old child now.” This commonality in age is underscored by Davy and Cushla’s reunion by book’s end: Now well into their 50s and 60s, their age difference is not all that big; Davy sports greying hair, and they both relate the fact of their children.

And what of love in this novel? Much of the book surrounds the supposed “love story” of Cushla and Michael, though their love indeed feels rather sparse. By the affair’s end the reader is left feeling with Cushla that perhaps Michael was not as enamored with her as we had been led to believe, that perhaps she was just one more in a string of affairs. Tommy’s boyish obsession with Cushla leads to his literal crime of passion. We get the sense that he does not murder Michael Agnew out of any political intention, which one may assume of a teen boy whose father had been assaulted at the height of Troubles-era violence, but rather, out of an implied jealousy, a wish for Cushla to direct her attention from Michael to Tommy McGeown. Is that love? To a teen boy it certainly feels like it. This evokes an idea that Kennedy is perhaps suggesting through this novel: love as a metric of time spent, of attention given.

Or maybe the message about love in this novel is to avoid the romanticization of the past, however that manifests. This is supported by the second epitaph Kennedy includes at the book’s start, a quote from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: “Ah, that first affair, how well one remembers it!” A cheeky quote to start readers off on a war-time love story, a story that by its very classification would seem to demand a somewhat reverent approach. We as readers know very little of Cushla’s life outside the time in which the novel is set, though Kennedy does privilege us with the information that she marries, remains married for some time, and has multiple children and grandchildren. So, the romantic remembrance of that first affair, set against the backdrop of the 70s Troubles in Northern Ireland, requires a related comparison: Perhaps Kennedy is warning against the tendency to romanticize the past in a “post-conflict” Northern Ireland.

Kennedy performs a deft sleight of hand in this debut novel, one that challenges the existing discourse surrounding Northern Irish writers, The Troubles, and writing about trauma in general. At the time of Trespasses’ release, Rosemary Jenkinson’s controversial article in Fortnight, “The Troubles with Irish literature,” was still very much at the forefront of many minds, especially of book reviewers and Irish writers. Jenkinson had made the provocative claim that Irish writers were trauma-mining for financial gain, an argument perhaps in some ways affirmed by her publisher dropping her novel from their roster in response to the article, citing not censorship but financial concerns. Sharon Dempsey, prolific Irish author, penned a response in The Irish Times to Jenkinson’s piece, condemning Jenkinson’s position (and aims in writing it), arguing that “for so long, the mainstream media wanted nothing from Northern Irish writers beyond the abject horror of political violence,” and that “in the absence of a truth and reconciliation process, fiction offers a space to work out how we navigate the past in order to move forward.” Further, Dempsey defends many Northern Irish crime writers’ approach to The Troubles as a topic, noting that “yes, we may look to the noir-esque Troubles tropes but we actively and effectively subvert them, finding new meaning and new possibilities.”  

While not explicitly a crime novel, it is ultimately crime that motivates much of the story’s action. For a text billed as war-era romance, the love present in the book cannot escape the politics and circumstance of the time. The novel’s climax involves the murder of Michael Agnew, which is not particularly surprising – the entirety of the novel depicts a reckless man almost inviting violence upon himself.

With the murder of Michael, Cushla is denied truth and reconciliation in her trespass — this slow-burn affair with the older married barrister. It is only a week before his death that she realized she has been played — his wife not the drunken hag Cushla had chosen to believe she was, but rather a relatively normal, pleasant woman, a mother, a wife. Cushla, just beginning to grapple with this realization, and still uncertain of how to approach it with Michael Agnew, is denied any sense of closure on the topic, when Michael’s life is suddenly taken.

By the book’s end, set decades later in 2015, all Cushla has to reconcile with regards to Michael and the affair of her young womanhood is the body of Michael memorialized in Penny’s art. And perhaps this is Kennedy’s lasting contribution to the discourse surrounding Irish writers and the Troubles: If we are operating, as Sharon Dempsey suggests, in an absence of institutional and societal truth and reconciliation regarding The Troubles, then all we have to sit with in the end is art, no matter what form it takes. Any intimacy, any time spent with the trauma of it, has meaning, and gets us as close to truth and reconciliation as we can presently muster.

— Meredith MacLeod Davidson
Creative Nonfiction Intern