Kennedy, who grew up Catholic in a predominantly Protestant town outside Belfast in the 1970s, has drawn on her experience of the Troubles before: her story ‘In Silhouette’, from her collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (2021), gives us a teenage girl’s view, charged and slippery, of an IRA killing carried out by her brother, Thady. News is a structuring motif in Trespasses: public events shadow private lives, transform them into public property.
The Special Powers Act.’ But the headmaster refuses to drop it, on the grounds that it encourages his pupils ‘to be aware of the world around them’ – as if they weren’t already. ‘They died instantly.’ Cushla Lavery, the class’s teacher and the young Catholic protagonist of Trespasses, Louise Kennedy’s first novel, hates the ritual of The News and the specialist vocabulary it inculcates. ‘A booby-trap bomb that was intended for a British army foot patrol exploded prematurely, killing two boys near the border,’ pipes up seven or eight-year-old Jonathan from the front row, like a miniature newscaster. News, in this community, might mean many things: that someone’s father, perennially out of work for ‘kicking with the wrong foot’, has managed to find a job that the pop group Mud has gone to number one with ‘Oh Boy’ or, more likely, that there’s been a murder, a beating, a car bomb, a riot, a high-profile trial. , between reciting the Hail Mary and beginning their lessons, the children at St Dallan’s Catholic primary school near Belfast do ‘The News’.
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