The search for salvation from sibling stalemate

FICTION: TrespassBy Rose Tremain Chatto, 253pp, £17.99

A WOMAN’S life has been destroyed by the evil done to her. The brother responsible lives with his various ghosts. Their world in a French valley is torn between the reality of a long-contested and now decaying ancestral home and their stalemated struggle, while a discontented Englishman wanders into all of this, intent on reinventing himself.

English writer Rose Tremain’s eleventh novel is many things: a wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller. Two very different sets of childless siblings, now in late middle age, are caught up in their respective pasts and contrasting histories in a novel about time and the doomed search for happiness. There are shades of Iris Murdoch as well as Tremain’s favoured theme of the English and the French attempting to make sense of it all in a characteristically intelligent, well-constructed narrative by a writer who has always been committed to story.

The opening chapter, sharply observed and almost a short story in itself, sets the scene by asking a question. That question contains the clue as to what will happen.

Trespassis that rare thing, a traditional novel. The characters are convincing, self-absorbed and all tormented by the same problem: time and its relentlessness. The French brother and sister are locked into a vicious dance of death. Damaged Audrun lives in a miserable modern bungalow, an eyesore built by the side of the ancient family home in which her alcoholic and brutal brother, Aramon, exists in squalor. He is so overwhelmed by his sins that he can no longer deal with everyday life and can't even feed his hunting dogs. The animals are starving. Suddenly he realises that he could sell out to wealthy British buyers intent on securing French holiday homes. He sees salvation in the crazy money such sales generate.

But Audrun, although given to blackouts, will not simply stand back. She knows the old farmhouse, the Mas Lunel, is also her birthright, even if there is some doubt about her birth. More particularly, she is aware of the dangerous gaping fissure in the front wall. Many of the old stone houses in the area have similar cracks appearing. The widening hole becomes a symbol of the gradual collapse going on. The characters are all ageing; everyone and everything is engaged in a race against time.

The French sequences are very good – the brother and sister bicker about everyday banalities and all the while in the background festers the far greater issue, the sister’s grievance, the brother’s guilt. Hundreds of miles away, France is also alive in the scene dancing before the eyes of Anthony Verey. He is an antiques expert, a famous one, and he loves his various treasures. Prime amongst his collection is a valuable French tapestry depicting aristocrats at play. He does not like parting with his favourites, and the tapestry is not for sale. “Anthony Verey had no wife, mistress, lover, child, dog or cat. Across his life, at one time or another, in various pairings and combinations, he’d possessed all these things – all except the child. But now he was alone. He was a man who had grown to love furnishings and nothing else.”

It all sounds rather bleak, but Tremain’s lightness of touch ensures that although it is impossible to engage with Verey, he is sufficiently human – and unhappy – to prove surprisingly interesting.

In spite of his success and his obvious self-absorption, Verey has an obsession beyond even his beloved objects: his childhood and his adored and totally selfish long-dead mother. He also has a sister, the very much alive Veronica, a garden designer who is now settled in France with her insecure lover, Kitty, a not very talented artist.

Tremain moves the narrative between the French and the English without it ever appearing contrived. The French brother and sister are caught in a dance to the death, but the English siblings are different. Veronica wants to help her depressed little brother, even though he is 64 and refuses to let go of the past. Kitty remains an outsider in all things in life, not least as regards Veronica’s bond with Anthony. She wishes Anthony dead, just as Audrun dreams of killing her brother.

A great deal happens in this clever, fast-moving novel. Tremain is a good writer. Above all, though, she is that thing readers and critics invariably underestimate: a professional novelist. Trespasshas much in common with Justin Cartwright's The Promise of Happiness(2004), including the dark humour and an unrelenting tragic irony. Anthony romanticises the past, he glorifies his mother. Veronica, the pony-loving pragmatist who shared that childhood, knows the truth. The twists abound and a bizarre sense of amoral justice runs through the book. There is no hero, no saint, several victims and some effective minor characters such as a loyal, weary local workman and the bored estate agent who refuses to allow her clients to eat in her car for fear of crumbs.

The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children. The loose ends are tied with such subtle understatement that the reader may fail to notice how careful the writing is. The tenses change, the scenes shift; you have been caught up in an everyday story that is easy to read and a bit more difficult to forget. It all makes sense, even if life seldom does.

Longlisted earlier this week for the Man Booker Prize, Tremain's very English, very clever novel makes fun of various conventions, including the property market, and, above all, human greed. Booker-shortlisted for Restoration in 1989, Tremain won the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for The Road Homeand was a strong contender for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize for The Darkness of Wallis Simpson.

The calm, deliberate quality of her work impresses, but it also deflects hype. Trespassis an unlikely winner, it should not win, but its longlisting is important – it draws attention to a writer who not only respects the novel form but also has never forgotten that well-drawn characters make good stories.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times