It was the first time she had seen his street in the daytime. Without the camouflage of robes and manners and whiskey he seemed vulnerable. Cushla craves a deeper connection, the trappings of his upscale profession: “He mumbled something about music and crossed the room to the stereo, where he began sorting through a stack of tapes. He drives her to his parents’ former house, where he keeps a flat, away from the gaze of his wife and Gina.
Their discreet couplings fire Cushla’s imagination. She feels a volt of attraction after a brief flirtation they embark on a relationship. He talks the talk but also walks the walk, or so she believes. Enter Michael Agnew, a middle-aged, married Protestant (“Prod”) and barrister who’s defended IRA criminals in court. She’s bored by the contours of her life: a devotion to Gina, her widowed, alcoholic, ball-and-chain mother quarrels with her older brother, Eamonn, who manages the business a numbness to reports of bloodshed and violence just beyond the relative safety of her “mixed” suburb. Meet Cushla Lavery, an occasional Catholic and 24-year-old schoolteacher who moonlights as a bartender in her family’s pub. The fog of war, even a guerrilla war, is still a fog.
Louise Kennedy recreates the Troubles in her restrained, absorbing debut, Trespasses, set in Belfast in the mid-1970s.
The past leaves its thumbprints on us all, and on none more than an emerging generation of dazzling literary talent. Artists across mediums have tapped that dark era as well, evidenced by the suspense-laden television series Bloodlands. Colum McCann’s sublime novel TransAtlantic stole its plot, in part, from real-world headlines, including George Mitchell’s Herculean efforts to secure a truce among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland in 1998, known as the Good Friday Agreement, the terminus of the Troubles, the decades-long conflict that pitted families and neighbors against each other.
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