Trespasses
Louise Kennedy started writing after having worked as a chef for 30 years. In 2021 she published the collection of short stories The End of the World is a Cul de Sac. Her first novel Trespasses, published with Riverhead Books, followed a year later.
In the center of the story is the 24-year-old primary school teacher Cushla. She teaches and lives on the outskirt of Belfast and helps out during the evenings in the family-owned pub. There she meets the married trial laywer Michael. They begin an affair and, up to this point, it all sounds like a relatively normal love story, such as I have read a million times. But Kennedy’s story is set in 1975 during the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, which refers to the civil war-like conditions in the country between 1969 to 1998. Opposing each other are the local Catholic Irish and the Protestant settlers who came to Ireland as a result of British colonization.
Cushla is Catholic, while her family’s pub is located in the Protestant suburbs. She supports the family of her student Davy, son of a protestant mother and a catholic father, after his father gets brutally beaten up. Michael is a protestant who takes on cases in which innocent catholic men are wrongly accused of crimes. After an invitation by Michael, Cushla teaches him and his friends the Irish language and is exposed to insults because of her background at their meet ups.
And so, the lives of the opposing sides interweave with each other in their day-to-day existence. Therein lies the power of Kennedy’s novel: how the day to day stands next to the brutality in a deeply divided city, while readers watch the characters longing for a bit of normality. In doing so, Kennedy cleverly asks questions about injustice and morality. Cushla’s empathy is opposed to ideological behaviour, which will not only have consequences for Cushla, but also for those around her. It is not an easy book; as a reader, you are constantly left with the question of how action out of compassion can be so very wrong. Nevertheless, and precisely because of this, I can only strongly recommend Louise Kennedy’s book. One of the reasons people turn to literature is to find cause for optimism. Here we find it in the kindness of individuals, which can give hope in the most difficult moments of life.