Trespass

Trespass
By Rose Tremain
Chatto & Windus, £17.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14.39

Rose Tremain’s latest novel, her 11th, returns to themes that will be familiar to readers of her early fiction. Like Sadler’s Birthday (1976), in which an ageing butler looks back on his life, and The Cupboard, published five years later, where an elderly novelist recounts her story and the history of the 20th century to a young journalist, Trespass explores the difficulties and miseries associated with growing old. Like The Swimming Pool Season, a Tremain novel from the mid-1980s, this new book is set in a rural community in southern France, and considers problems of expatriate British interlopers.

But whereas The Swimming Pool Season was characterised by wry, pointed observation, Trespass is a much darker and more unsettling novel. Nasty secrets and violent impulses are never far from its surface and the story climaxes in a bloody, vengeful murder. As a writer, Tremain has never shied away from testing herself in different genres, and Trespass is her first attempt at a thriller with a sudden, though hardly unpredictable, twist at its conclusion.

The setting is the Cévennes region of south-central France. Aramon Lunel is an alcoholic, existing in squalor and wasting what remains of his life. Increasingly he is haunted by his violent past and by his sexual abuse of his adoptive sister Audrun. Aramon is the owner of the Mas Lunel, an isolated stone farmhouse, while Audrun, who nurses fantasies of retribution, lives in a modern bungalow on the boundaries of the main property.

Into this world comes Anthony Verey, a London antiques dealer, who has decided to spend the last years of his life in France, living near his sister Veronica, a garden designer, and her partner Kitty, an unsuccessful watercolourist whom Anthony despises. Veronica is a protective elder sibling to Anthony, the one person, apart from their dead and idealised mother, who is as important to him as his pursuit of beautiful objets d’art (his other pursuit, of casual sex with young men, appears to be fading). Searching for the perfect spot to settle, Anthony discovers the Mas Lunel and falls in love with it, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to disaster.

The parched earth and scorching heat, the silent valleys and echoing gorges, provide an atmosphere of foreboding to which Tremain adds her customary, often ingenious touches. This is a novel from which sentiment is almost entirely absent – except in the somewhat lame reconciliation scene at its close. Taken aback at first by her portrayal of old age, all vomit, stench and pant-wetting, one comes to admire Tremain’s savage and unrelenting gaze.

The two couples, the Lunels and Vereys, are mirror images of each other, representing sibling envy and deep uncompromising veins of love and hate. But, while we may understand that their desperation stems from the feeling life is running out, we don’t like them any the more for it. The French brother and sister, with their collaborator past, at times descend to caricature, and appear as overripe as the camembert sold in sandwiches by the Cévenol roadsides. The relationship between the English pair is more believable, crowned by a beautifully crafted scene when Anthony disappears and Veronica’s fear rises trembling off the page to touch us.

And, everywhere, images of trespass are never far away. They are there in the literal sense in which Audrun’s bungalow trespasses on her brother’s land; in the way Kitty resents Anthony’s sudden reappearance in Veronica’s life, and the threat this poses to Kitty’s relationship with her (“Why don’t lovers understand better the damage trespass can do?” Kitty asks). Most of all, the novel looks at how life may be diminished or enhanced by the acceptance of death’s own approaching trespass.

Larger questions like this are buttressed by the way in which the novel’s characters seem to grow or retreat in relation to the spaces, confined or unlimited, in which Tremain allows them to exist. She knows how to stretch (sometimes overstretch) a good yarn, and this one, with its pacy, short chapters, has an effortless ease to it. Trespass is likely to prove a hit with the beach-reading crowd this summer, even if murder aficionados may baulk at some of the mechanisms it uses to bring about the dénouement (black-outs, real or imagined, experienced here by two of the characters, are always a cheat). Some of Tremain’s more faithful readers, though, may incline to the view that with this book she comes close to slumming it.

Mark Bostridge is the author of ‘Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend’ (Viking)