‘Trespass’ Stays Within Standard Thriller Framework

After writing 10 novels and five collections of stories, author Rose Tremain should be a master at navigating her own literary terrain. Yet, in her eleventh novel, “Trespass,” the English writer wanders astray while attempting to explore how haunting childhood memories, consuming desire, and disputed hometown property can bring about the collision of four tainted souls.  Although “Trespass” has potential in the themes it undertakes, it fails to go beyond the formulaic, archetypal thriller and only wades in the concepts of envy, corruption, sex, greed, and love without realizing their complex scope.

“Trespass” is constructed as a typical thriller. Set in a small, isolated, and hauntingly beautiful village in southern France, the novel revolves around two major story arcs that become quite predictably connected. The first concerns the elderly Anthony Verey, a self-absorbed but deeply insecure antiques enthusiast, struggling to come to terms with the downward trajectory of his career. Unable to handle the fame and prosperity of his peers, and unable to let go of or sell his ‘beloveds,’ he turns to his sister, Veronica (nicknamed V) for a fresh start. Moving in with V and her artist girlfriend, Kitty, Anthony consequently falls in love with the prospects of the countryside life. As he searches for a French abode in hope of jumpstarting his future, his eyes are immediately fixed on an estate entitled Mas Lunel.

Parallel to this storyline, brother and sister Aramon and Audrun Lunel happen to live on the very piece of land that Anthony desires. Bound by a dark past of both paternal and sibling sexual abuse, the two have a twisted relationship of hatred and deep understanding of one another’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Things begin spiraling out of control when Aramon and Audrun disagree on whether or not to sell the property. After much scheming and dreaming, the separate Verey and Lunel sibling spheres overlap, culminating in a dramatic confrontation between all four characters.

With only four major protagonists and full chapters that alternate back and forth between the characters’ viewpoints, “Trespass” could easily unfold as a study of the complexity of human relationships. Yet it quickly becomes evident that Anthony, Veronica, Aramon, and Audrun are not only unlikeable, but also a tad cliché. Tremain attempts to make her protagonists multi-faceted, but only ends up assigning certain sinful traits to certain characters and attributing these flaws to disturbing and troubling childhoods.

Anthony, on one hand, suffers from an almost Dorian Gray-like obsession with glory and eternal life. He is overwhelmed by the beauty of young boys, which, he feels, forces him to “enslave himself to their virility and youth.” Such insecurities are explained in flashbacks during which an adolescent Anthony desperately tries to please his dismissive, irritable, and unfaithful mother. In other words, his constant need for approval and attention stems from a childhood devoid of love. Thus, although the antique collector has the potential to be a complex figure, his situation is reduced to this simple cause and effect equation.

Similarly, Aramon and Kitty lack the substance needed to blossom into fully dynamic characters. While the former is simply depicted as the villain who is caught in the abused-abuser cycle, the latter is only defined by her sexual jealousy towards Anthony, who has distracted his sister from her lesbian lover. Over and over again, Kitty describes how intolerable Anthony is and how annoyed she is to have been “relegated to second place.” While these thoughts and emotions are understandable and fundamentally human, Tremain reiterates them so much that they lose their original potency.

Despite the fact that Tremain sacrifices depth for ineffective breadth, she does manage to showcase her skills as a writer through mood and tone, creating an overall landscape that becomes more memorable and powerful than the characters. The author poetically describes Mas Lunel’s desolate yet beautiful surroundings: “On the bare mother-rock, tiny particles of matter accrued in cracks and declivities: filaments of dead leaves, wisps of charred broom. And in the air, almost invisible, were specks of dust, grains of sand and these settled in amongst the detritus, making a bed for het spores of lichen and moss.” Likewise, the peculiar fogginess of the estate is evoked with mysterious and oddly fantastical descriptions of “plumed dark weeds that hugged the shingle banks of the Gardon in a few shady corners, where snakes sometimes made their nests, in places the fishermen avoided.”

The ghostly mood is also accentuated by Tremain’s incorporation of a silkworm as a motif throughout the novel. The writer’s descriptions of these creatures as “incubated worms under their heavy skirts, white worms against the white flesh of their bellies” serve as a foreboding indicator of all bad things to come. Yet, even though these descriptions are eerily effective, they appear so often in the novel that the author spells out the silkworms’ symbolic presence too blatantly, and by the end of the work the motif is tired and overused.

Even though Tremain’s prose in “Trespass,” is often elegantly constructed, the novel as a whole is no more than a typical contemporary thriller with little originality or realistic insight into human behavior. With themes and characters that are simplified to their most generic, trite forms, Tremain’s newest work is far from captivating and fails to reach its full potential.