Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking ... Kennedy deftly reveals how violence in a conflict zone can more accurately be described as intertwined with and inseparable from daily life ... In Trespasses, as in life, humor provides an antidote to the darkest times ... Kennedy gives us children who are funny and surprising and uplifting in exactly the ways real children are, with none of the treacle that sometimes sneaks into fictional depictions of young people ... Kennedy writes beautifully about love ... As the novel progresses, it picks up a propulsive energy, the kind that compels you to keep reading straight through to the end. A rising sense of tension throughout comes to a shocking head. I am not a crier, but by the final pages of Trespasses, I was in tears. It’s a testament to Kennedy’s talents that we come to love and care so much about her characters.
Kennedy describes their upper-middle-class bohemian way of life in perfect detail, the delicious, casually presented meals, the vintage doodads that ornament the kitchen, the polite, but condescending manner of most of them toward Cushla ... This is the reality of the Troubles, of beatings, revenge killings, executions, bombed out buildings ... That, too, Kennedy conjures in all its pervasive horror and fear ... This is a deeply evocative novel in the particularity of social description and ambience, in its atmosphere of menace, and in the urgency of the emotions portrayed — sexual passion, guilt, shame, fear, hatred and compassion. Kennedy is masterly in conveying the nature of Cushla's predicament ... Moving, hard-hitting.
In Trespasses, Kennedy has...room to flesh out her characters and dramatize their predicaments. She does so masterfully, convincing her reader of all that unfolds ... The book’s gritty backdrop is brilliantly depicted ... Through her thoughts, her deeds and her dialogue, Cushla emerges as a flawed, bruised but ultimately defiant heroine. Whether we find her happy yet unfulfilled with her lover, or at her lowest ebb with her mother...she is someone we root for every step of the way ... Kennedy has written a captivating first novel that manages to be beautiful and devastating in equal measure.
Restrained, absorbing ... Kennedy’s prose is taut but liminal, opening up space for Cushla’s transformation ... Trespasses has the compression of a short story but the gait of a longer narrative ... A sharp attention to detail imbues each chapter. She subtly shades in her supporting cast ... Kennedy avoids fussy plot twists and decorative language: By going small she goes large. Her intimate drama carries the burden of a larger history. Step by step, Trespasses moves toward inevitable tragedy, but the author surprises as fate closes around Cushla. Wise far beyond its first-book status.
Partway through I did take time to learn more about Irish-Protestant tensions by reading websites and articles. Occasionally, I’d look up an unfamiliar turn of phrase. Did this enhance my appreciation of the story? Probably. I love a novel that inspires me to learn more about history, culture or language. But even if you don’t enjoy additional research, Kennedy’s powerful writing, tragic humor and vivid characters will move and haunt you.
News is a structuring motif in Trespasses: public events shadow private lives, transform them into public property ... This mode of observation, piecing together the big picture from small details, is something the novel asks of its readers too. Kennedy fleshes out her characters’ identities by pointing to meaningful accents, behaviours, interests, tics of speech ... For almost 250 pages, Trespasses is a quiet novel, quiet in view of the place and time it inhabits ... The key question Trespasses asks itself, often framed more or less consciously by Cushla, isn’t ‘what would happen if?’ – we all know what will happen if – but something more interesting and complicated, along the lines of ‘if this is what must happen, how do we get there?’ ... Kennedy’s insistence on context, her way of fashioning characters out of the details surrounding them, catches everyone. In this world, there’s no escaping who you are.
Because Cushla is engaged in an illicit relationship, the action of Trespasses, plays out in enclosed spaces ... The texture of these spaces is precisely rendered ... That the relationship with Michael Agnew is going to end badly is hardly a spoiler but despite the foreshadowing, the end when it comes is not just a shock, it’s a gasp out-loud moment, a punch in the solar plexus ... Kennedy’s writing is full of compassion and power. The intensity of her characterisations, even the secondary characters, speak to her writing origins in the short form ... Trespasses doesn’t read like a debut novel. Here is a writer sure-footed emotionally and dexterous linguistically. The novel recreates the 70s world faultlessly ... The writing is witty and mordant. But most importantly, Trespasses seems like a necessary piece of work. Lest we forget what the Troubles really meant.
Kennedy doesn’t shy away from either fun or femininity. Nor does Kennedy avert her eyes from the Troubles, the era during which her novel is set. By attending to romance and courtship, and by writing about beatings and bombings alongside gossip and domestic detail, Kennedy refuses to shrink or ignore any part of her characters’ lives. In telling a fully realized romance that is also a fully realized story of the Troubles, she demonstrates how artificial it is for fiction to divide love and war ... Class and sectarian tensions—some ambient, some verging on explicit—ripple through every description and bit of dialogue in the scene ... One of the great pleasures of Trespasses is Kennedy’s ability to twine social dynamics together so tightly that they grow impossible to tease apart ... written in a style that feels intimate and gossipy. Kennedy has a keen eye for human detail, and is adept at creating characters through the little observations one might pass around like rumors ... Such social details are as enjoyable to read as they clearly are for Cushla to gather. It’s more fun still when she begins actively seeking facts about Michael, animated by desire that all but radiates off the page ... Their steamy, frank sex scenes illustrate the joys of being seen both physically and emotionally. Such satisfying sex between a straight man and woman is rare in literary fiction. Kennedy offers readers an honest portrait of pleasure that can be difficult to find outside books explicitly marketed as romance novels ... Smelly laundry and tidy nails may not sound like the stuff of war stories, or, depending on your biases, of serious fiction. Trespasses is baldly both ... Kennedy compels her readers to give the same heft to Cushla’s desires and emotions as to her political predicament ... Even during wartime, civilian life continues. Clothes get washed; rumors get spread; dinner parties get thrown; love gets made. To omit these details from our literature of conflict would be to produce a false literature. For habitual readers of war fiction that takes place in barracks or on battlefields—and, really, for any reader at all—Trespasses is a reminder of that truth.
Louise Kennedy sets herself the challenge of encapsulating those unspeakable times and the powerlessness felt by ordinary people caught in the crossfire. She does so with skill, combining unflinching authenticity with narrative dexterity and a flair for detail, all wrapped up in a moving love story – two, really ... Deftly calibrated.
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 ... Trespasses refuses false comfort ... Throughout, Kennedy writes with fierce power; Trespassesis a prose machine that tests apparent forms of sincerity against the single principle of human solidarity ... 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 ... 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.
Plotwise...we’re in traditional territory ... Technique, too, is traditional. The point of view is third person. The prose is in the past tense. This is not a book that is interested in performing radical aesthetic surgery on the realist novel. In fact its mode is what you might call low-realist ... Trespasses is a novel distinguished by a quality rare in fiction at any time: a sense of utter conviction. It is a story told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event ... Kennedy is also quietly great at the smaller details ... The prose manages both to surprise and to delight without ever calling undue attention to itself. Of course, prose pyrotechnics would be beside the point. Kennedy’s real interest is in the evocation of character and context, and these she approaches with a fearsome attentiveness to emotional nuance and a powerful sensitivity to gesture and speech that makes each scene feel impressively alive ... Trespasses may be a novel built along conventional lines. But it thrums throughout with the passion and poise of mastery.
A timely reminder of how the trauma of the Troubles still needs to be exorcized ... In Trespasses, this eye for the telling detail is bolstered by a narrative style that flickers between sharp precision and haziness, as if the protagonist’s memories are blurred at the edges ... Kennedy is an astute and incisive writer, and Trespasses offers a profound glimpse into the continuing trauma of the Northern Irish Troubles.
Crackles with...blunt humour ... What elevates a familiar tale of forbidden love across faith and class barriers is the interplay between Cushla’s private relationships, her professional actions and the political context. The vivid, propulsive narrative is punctuated by grim headlines ... Slow news days don’t exist, and the book gathers a deathly momentum as it hurtles towards its shocking climax ... In quick-witted Cushla, Kennedy has created a compelling protagonist who keenly feels the humiliations of being a philanderer’s ‘bit on the side’, yet can’t resist the affair’s precarious, tunnel-vision intensity ... Cleverly crafted.
A debut novel that will fill every historical fiction fan with gratitude ... Kennedy’s unyielding narrative voice exhibits heart-wrenching impassivity, forcing readers to grapple with their own prejudices and morals ... The novel’s brilliance lies in Kennedy’s commitment to nuance ... Impeccably written, Trespasses is a story that every reader will internalize differently. In only 304 pages, it achieves the complexity of a multigenerational saga without sacrificing the striking intricacies of its central protagonist’s story.
Kennedy’s debut novel captures the odd ability of war-zone residents to be simultaneously adrenalized by and resigned to their environment. She also, nonchalantly, delivers the mundane details of generations of terrorism gone amok ... Kennedy’s characters are born and live under dark stars; she illuminates the unescapable harms that occur in that darkness.
Engaging if sometimes clunky ... The straightforward prose style can be wearing in its endless accrual of detail, but Kennedy does a lovely job at capturing Cushla’s mixed feelings and her determination to live her life during wartime. A solid character portrait emerges from the turbulent backdrop.
