For she is interested in probing the grey areas of the conflict, which existed even while it was at its peak. The “love-across-the-divide” narrative is a familiar Troubles trope however, Kennedy elevates the storyline beyond this paradigm through her nuanced exploration of the ambiguities inherent to the novel’s setting. The central question of the novel is: does their love story have nothing to do with politics, or everything? Cushla Lavery is a twenty-four-year-old Catholic schoolteacher and Michael Agnew is a middle-aged, married, Protestant barrister. Earlier in Carson’s poem the speaker watches through an open window “what looked like the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet”, except the couple is arguing: “‘It’s got nothing’, she was snarling, ‘nothing / to do with politics … That goes for you too!’” Carson’s glimpsed image recurs within Kennedy’s portrait of star-crossed lovers whose relationship is framed by the Troubles. Kennedy excerpts poetic lines that consider the conflicting cultural codes of the troubled North, where “things remain unresolved” and they “may be black or white”. There is, of course, no direct translation for the word “no” in the Irish language. Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses features an epigraph from Belfast poet Ciaran Carson’s The Irish for No (1987), whose title also names the first section of her novel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |