The news started the way it always did with a montage of short scenes. When she’s not cleaning up after her mother, Cushla gives a hand behind the bar of her brother’s pub, frequently coming in for unwarranted attention from chippy, drunken British soldiers. Her widowed mother has become increasingly erratic, her behaviour fuelled by an alcohol intake so high she sometimes passes out. The vocabulary of a 7-year-old child now.Ĭushla’s home life is just as stressful. Instead of inconsequential snippets about pop groups and football matches, the children of St Dallan’s school offer headlines about car bombings, shootings, internments and beatings.īooby trap. Every school day begins, at the headmaster’s direction, with reports from her class about what they’ve heard on the news. Trespasses reflects these times through the experiences of Cushla Lavery, a primary school teacher in a suburb of Belfast. The other guests just shrug and return to their drinks. When a Catholic wedding party is interrupted by squaddies who swagger around but leave without questioning anyone, it’s only the bride who seems outraged at the intrusion.
She evokes the tinderbox atmosphere of a community whose residents have become accustomed - almost inured - to army checkpoints, armed patrols and alerts. Louise Kennedy’s debut novel is set in a Belfast suburb during the turbulent times before the accord, a period known as The Troubles. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.It seems fitting to write a review of Trespasses during the week of events marking the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the landmark peace accord that ended three decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Against her better judgment, Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites.
There she meets Michael Agnew, a Protestant barrister who’s made a name for himself defending IRA members. Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.Īmid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast, teaching at a parochial school and moonlighting at her family’s pub. “TRESPASSES vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry.”-Oprah Daily “Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.”-J.Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
0 kommentar(er)
