Rose Tremain – ‘Trespass’

I have now moved on to Rose Tremain’s recent novel Trespass which is  a very different sort of book from McEwan’s Solar. I thought it was better than The Long Way Home at the outset but revised my opinion. I felt the plotting took over and the patterning of the two stories: Anthony Verey and his sister V with her lover Kittie; Audrun and her brother Aramon around their home the Mas Lunel was simply over patterned. Yes, the direct incest theme between Audrun and Aramont as well as  Audrun and her father was credible. This was forced sex and was in effect rape. The relationship between V and Anthony was hinted at and was certainly voluntary. The novel is about these 60s year olds finding ways of living and inevitably reviewing their childhood and growing up. Again, that felt natural. As someone of similar age I could identify with the ‘how to live now’ element. Thinking of childhood and early working life is inevitable but it’s shared – what do we both remember? Perhaps that is the point in Tremain’s novel – none of the characters has much to share and little they wish to re-visit. I’m sure incest can work like that – it can be blotted out because it is unbearable. We learn that Anthony’s memory of a party for his mother Lal in a tree house was not a happy event; Lal fell on the way down and hurt her leg badly but Anthony has blotted this out. Anthony recalls some of the put downs V received form her mother. Their father is a shadowy figure who is often away. His wife, Lal, from colonial South Africa takes lovers which upsets Anthony.

Tremain peels away layers of her characters’ past. But is rather forced, for no matter how she tries to distinguish between the remembered pasts of her English family and the known but outwardly forgotten past of her poorer French family, it is experienced as a deliberate patterning. The characters do not get out of the story to live their own lives. They cannot stand up and say to the narrator – You’ve got it wrong there’.  They are prisoners of Tremain’s narrative. That it is unhappy, revealing hidden doubts and unhappiness, even for the new generation represented by Melodie and Jeanne, did not matter. I felt it was too structured. So it was a bit disappointing. I’m now going to read Erpenbeck’s Visitations and then move back to the 19^th century to re-read Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot and Maupassant’s Bel Ami.