Louise Kennedy’s first novel, Trespasses, was one of those rare triumphs, a debut that was not only rapturously received by critics but adored by readers around the world. A story of forbidden love set during the Troubles in 1970s Belfast, it was an international bestseller, translated into more than 20 languages. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s prize and scooped debut fiction of the year at the British Book awards. A four-part television adaptation with Gillian Anderson aired last autumn on Channel 4.
Inevitably Kennedy found herself lauded as an overnight success – much was made of her 30-year career as a professional chef – but in fact she had been writing short stories for a decade and to considerable acclaim; her first collection, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac, was published in 2021. Included in that book was Belladonna, the story of Róisín, a young girl from Belfast who moves south with her mother and, ostracised by her new classmates, becomes friendly with the couple who live across the road. Like Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the prickly and precociously bright Róisín misinterprets the dynamic of her neighbours’ marriage to disastrous effect.
It is a sucker-punch of a story, conjuring in a few restrained pages the violent insecurity and self-absorption of early adolescence. What a joy, then, to rediscover Róisín in the opening pages of Stations, Kennedy’s blisteringly good second novel. It is 1982 and Róisín, still very much the outsider from the north, strikes up a fierce and unexpected friendship with Red, a boy with a reputation for trouble who is “spoken about in giddy whispers at school”. Róisín’s father, a drinker, has moved with his new wife to London. Red’s family is dysfunctional in ways Róisín only vaguely understands, but which come to a head when Red finds himself on the wrong side of the law. Unable to stay, Red bolts to London. It is a year before Róisín, visiting her father for Christmas, finds herself caught up with him once again, the pull he exerts on her impossible to resist.
The novel traces the warp and weft of their relationship over the next 25 years. Structured like a sporadically kept diary, clusters of dated entries disrupted by long gaps, it has echoes of David Nicholls’s One Day; but Kennedy’s London is altogether grimmer and more brutal, a city of squats and gas heaters and not enough change for the payphone. Her people are also more damaged, an Irish diaspora fractured by displacement, scarred not only by poverty and violence and addiction but by shame and loss. “Can you not feel it?” Red asks Róisín when, walking through London, they pass the site of the old Millbank prison. “All those wretched lives layered up underneath us.” Kennedy’s émigrés flee the old country, they build new lives, construct new families, but they carry the weight of the past always with them. However far they travel, they can never escape from themselves.
Kennedy moved to London herself as a young woman and evokes the 1980s city with almost hallucinogenic precision, but her greater power lies in her remarkable humanity. Her characters are messy, flawed, often shatteringly self-destructive but, mapped with her fierce compassion, they march straight off the page. As a teenager Róisín is bolshy and obstreperous; she is also funny and filthy and generous and agonisingly vulnerable. As she gets older, she gets better – sometimes – at managing herself but she never really changes. The way Kennedy conjures her, we do not want her to.
Stations is at its heart a love story, a furious, tender, potty-mouthed paean to loyalty and generosity of spirit. It is also an elegy to a generation of lost Irish boys, a heartbreaking testament to the violence and fear passed down from father to son. In its title, Stations acknowledges the transience of the diasporic experience, the trains and boats and coaches, but, steeped as the book is in an in-the-bone Catholicism (one particularly powerful scene has Róisín unable to bring herself to shake Red’s father’s hand at Mass), it carries too the idea of the Stations of the Cross, the 14 images of Jesus on the day of his Crucifixion.
In Trespasses, the teacher Cushla, studying the Stations during the Easter Sunday sermon, reckons Jesus “a ringer for James Taylor”. In Stations, it is tempting to see the elusive and charismatic Red, “loping along in [Róisín’s] father’s coat like an itinerant preacher”, as a Christ figure, offering a kind of redemption through his suffering. Can cycles of anguish or neglect ever be broken? Is love in all its frustrating insufficiency enough to save us? Kennedy’s novel is too subtle and clear-eyed to offer easy answers, but her questions will burn themselves into your heart.
• Stations by Louise Kennedy is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
