Trespass, By Valerie Martin

From moor to marsh, fear lurks in the fogs of war

"Run for your life; it's that hornet headed girl." Chloe fears that her son's Croatian girlfriend wants to trap him into marriage. But is she rapacious or just trying to piece together a life after her family has been torn apart by civil war? Chloe, an artist whose latest project is the illustrating of a new edition of Wuthering Heights, and her historian husband Brendan, live in a converted farmhouse in rural upstate New York. But their almost idyllic existence is shaken first by a poacher who appears like a phantom amid the autumn-turning trees, then by the arrival of their son and his new lover, Salome. She may be a difficult and unnerving young woman, it is also true that Chloe cannot let go of her son or the power she has over her family.

The stories wound together in this novel of invasion and forbidden love share a landscape of dread: the forests of the warring tribes of former Yugoslavia, the marshes and humid flatlands of Louisiana where Croatian refugees have settled, the grey moors of Wuthering Heights. If the Iraqi war surrounds Trespass, the passionate and often cruel story of the love between Catherine and the outsider and rebel Heathcliff is at its heart.

Even the resolution of Wuthering Heights, in which the children of the two conflicting families, one wild and one tame, make a peaceful marriage, is echoed by the oddly happy ending that Valerie Martin provides for her unsettling story.

While there's a satisfaction in the way that the stories in Trespass mirror each other, with pairs of lovers defying their families, and the recurring images of invaders breaching the boundaries of class, ethnicity and country, Martin tries to draw too many strands together. There is something artificial and formulaic about linking the Iraqi war, the civil wars of Yugoslavia and the Crusades. These references, coupled with the shifts in point of view, tend to diminish the intensity of the central story of two families.

Martin won the Orange Prize in 2003 with Property, another tale of America at the edge of a war, in which a woman is trapped both by marriage to a Louisiana plantation owner and her complicity in slavery. With its unrelenting narrator and gripping central story, it needed no further historical allusions to show how slavery destroyed and perverted both master and slave.

If Trespass is less perfect than this earlier novel, it remains an affecting work. The writing is lucid but restrained, as if Martin wants nothing to distract the reader from the confessions of Salome's mother, whose love affair with a Serbian leads indirectly to her son's death and her own terrible experiences of rape and torture, and from the scenes of the novel's bogeyman, the poacher whose shots ring through Chloe and Brendan's lovemaking.

Chloe's fear of him and Salome may be irrational, even xenophobic. But her dread, which persists in the reader's mind despite Martin's attempt to move beyond the struggle between invader and invaded, gives the novel its chill and its power.

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