Stations by Louise Kennedy:  Love, friendship and redemption

I couldn’t have been more delighted when Louise Kennedy’s Stations dropped through my letter box. I was a huge fan of her short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac and even more impressed by her debut novel, Trespasses, beautifully adapted by the BBC last year. Her second novel follows Roísín who meets Red when they’re teenagers in 1982 beginning an unlikely, unexpected friendship.

She’d only known this haggard boy for a couple of weeks and she’d trust him with her life.

Red’s waiting for Roísín to deliver a letter from his girlfriend, one of her many persecutors at the school where she’s still considered an outsider years after her father moved his family from the north then left them. It’s a humiliating task but Roísín knows Tina will be indebted enough to leave her alone. She and Red are both smart, curious, interested and already damaged but whereas she spills the beans about her drunken father he’s tight-lipped about his, spending nights at Roísín’s house as their friendship deepens. Red leaves home, aged fifteen, sleeping on the local dealer’s sofa, fleeing to London after a raid. It’s Red that Roísín turns to when she discovers she has a baby half-sister on a visit to her father in London, moving into his squat, surprised to find Tina’s brother living there, too. For Roísín, friendship is no longer enough but Red rebuffs her, spiralling downwards until the funny, knowledgeable Dickens-quoting friend who’d taken her in disappears into a drug fuelled daze. Their friendship fades into the background for Roísín until in 2007 Red’s mother asks her to find him, forcing her to re-examine her own past.

Red in need of a home, Roísín desperate for a friend. Was that all it had been?  

Kennedy unfolds this immersive story of friendship, love and vulnerability from the perspective of Roísín who hides her pain under layers of angry snark, punctured by the death of her father and what she discovers. Sarcasm is her weapon, often inflicting wounds on herself, yet she’s capable of love, saved from ruining her life by Red despite the ruination of his own. In spite of her best efforts, Roísín finds herself surrounded by love from her half-sister and her mother, her own mother and her father whose heartfelt pride was unexpressed. Kennedy succeeds in engaging sympathy for Roísín despite her determined attempts to sabotage herself, revealing a world of pain in a few understated words, while delivering her story with wit and humour against a background of pitch perfect ‘80s small town Ireland and London. I’m not a reader who needs a happy ending, but a hopeful one is always welcome particularly when accompanied by a dollop of redemption. Still mystified as to why this one wasn’t at least on the Booker longlist.

Bloomsbury Books: London 9781526664327 320 pages Hardback