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A critical review of Louise Kennedy's sophomore novel Stations, which explores the complex friendship between two characters, Red and Róisín, spanning 25 years and two centuries. The review highlights the novel's depiction of Irish emigrants in 1980s London, its themes of loss and memory, and its literary connections to works by Edna O'Brien and Heaney.
“Red in need of a home, Róisín desperate for a friend. Was that all it had been? ” By the moment the main character of Louise Kennedy ’s darkly glittering saga of friendship and time asks this question, we know enough to know their bond had been much more.
But what, exactly? How do need and affection shape a lifetime? And, when only memories remain, what does it cost to visit the “realm of the lost and forgotten”? Every bit as devastating, skilful and alive as her lauded debut novel, Trespasses , Kennedy’s sophomore novel is a masterwork.
She builds softly from two lonely people with shared tastes and dangerous blind spots into a group portrait that spreads effortlessly across two centuries, two islands, two eras of mistakes and discoveries. The light of this book rises until we realise that we are being shown not only a capable, self-loathing girl and her banished, self-immolating other half but a vertiginous and unforgettable view of “the hundreds of thousands who’d gone before them”.
Red and Róisín meet in 1982, he the source of “giddy whispers at school”, in flight from an awful father, and she a recent transplant from the North who code-switches between two accents. Stations follows their tentative, lopsided attachment across 25 years in three sections: a season of meeting and a season of seeking bookend a section that throbs with a painfully honest depiction of listening, longing, mishearing and losing touch between 1984 and 1989.
Kennedy etches the milieu of Irish emigrants in a mid-1980s London squat with grimy, sexy granularity and then, with a sure touch, peppers her social naturalism with a mythical significance. She draws us towards an Orphean quest into the underworld in search of a friend who dressed like Dennis the Menace, sank into an ordinary hell and left no trace but an unsearchable wake of grief and wonder.
The 18-year time jump in the book is brutal and perfect, resuming the story at a funeral service where, emblematically, “the host was clinging to one of Róisín’s wisdom teeth”. Kennedy, a chef for 30 years before her turn to fiction, knows something about the workings and limits of taste.
Róisín first appeared in Kennedy’s short story Belladonna from The End of the World is a Cul de Sac; the sweet, fallible protagonist who devoured The White Album in that story begins this book wearing Joan Didion as a part of her teenage pose. It’s funny and telling when she later weaves in her mind a “spider plan” for a college essay with “‘Cultural Capital’ in its centre”.
And it’s significant that Róisín’s essay on cultural capital gets interrupted by flirtation with a banker boy in mergers and acquisitions who will tip 10 quid to Red before that old friend appears to vanish up the hole in his own arm. Notice how the novel’s timespan leaps quite precisely over the Celtic Tiger.
It lands with tentative dignity on the cusp of the crash, heralded in an undertone by a final evocative riverside moment where there “were voices coming from the bank”. So-called prosperity remains resolutely unrepresentable in this novel, though it’s present as a lost time and a spreading bruise.
“Can you feel it? ” Red asks, “All those wretched lives layered up underneath us. ” In Róisín’s delightful growing friendship with her stepmother and half-sister, the novel seeks a realer prosperity and sense of home. This book’s title is as perfectly pitched as was Trespasses, which held transgressions of sexual propriety and political boundary inside of an echo of the Lord’s Prayer.
Aptly for a story about how we get where we’re going, Stations suggests both exploratory transience and fated belonging: a station might be one stop along a set path – down the radio band, the tube line, the pilgrim’s purgation – or, as when we talk of someone’s “station in life”, it might be the social position into which you’re born or carried. Heir to the agile indignation of Edna O’Brien, Kennedy’s fiction is the rare art that stands poised between Bowie’s Station to Station and Heaney’s Station Island.
We might tend to think that knowledge brings us closer to the thing we know. But, as Red says admiringly of a punk band’s performance, “The fury’s like a force field”. There is also knowledge that allures all the more for its sad warning glow, which we might only later realise was attempting to hold others apart from the shipwreck of our selves.
The words that kept rolling round my mind while I read this novel’s loving picture of Red were the closing lines from John Ashbery’s Down by the Station, Early in the Morning, a poem that is, like this novel, about devastation and the survival of reverence: Kennedy shows us “the light/ from the lighthouse that protects as it pushes away. ” Greg Londe teaches literatures in English at Cornell University and lives in Wexford
Louise Kennedy Stations Irish Literature Friendship Novel
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