Stations by Louise Kennedy: book review
My heart is genuinely aching after finishing Stations, a book about grief, shame, forgiveness, and deeply honest love. The novel follows RóisÃn from 1982 until 2007, dropping in at the moments where her life coincides with that of Red, the boy that she loves, who probably loves her, their relationship left undefined too long to ever be pulled into a concrete space, neither fully ready at the right times. The book begins with them as teenagers—RóisÃn an outcast in school having moved to Kildare from the north and Red running from his terrible home life. When RóisÃn delivers letters from Red's girlfriend who has a strict and forbidding father, she starts to bond with Red. He lives with Ró and her mother at various points as they muddle through the end of their school years. They pick up when Ró moves into his squat in London where another friend from home, Barry Doyle, has found his way, as they all tip into being adults. But, by then, they're already on two sides of a sharp divide. Red's dealing to make money and using as well, and while everyone else in the squat flirts with heavy drugs and alcohol too, they all have support systems to pull them back in. Ró finds herself spending the next twenty years bouncing between London and Kildare, never quite able to hold all the pieces at once.
I think what makes this book so bone-achingly special is the way that Kennedy captures having that ineffable connection with another person. When your brain waves just run on the same signal. When you're friends but also something beyond that, something that no one's willing to touch because there's too much to lose. While Red slowly disintegrates into his circumstances, he never quite loses that charisma, that charm, that ability to skate on top of things with his wit that makes you believe that of course he'll be okay. Cats always land on their feet. But the stark reality is that there's a certain amount of privilege required to make that happen. The lives that Kennedy renders in the 2007 portion of the novel is quite proof of that.
Stations is such a difficult book to review because it's simultaneously working on so many levels at once. It captures vastly different phases of life and it traverses the realms of friendship, love, and family. It considers abuse, financial privilege, who is left behind by society and the government. There are so many complexities that all interlock to form a realistic web of lives on the page. Centrally, Kennedy asks questions about what we owe each other, especially when you were the party that was hurt first. She charts evolving feelings on difficult relationships, how we change as we get older. The parts that become softer and the parts that harden. And, central to Ró, what it means to always put the blame on yourself.
The novel nearly feels like two or three separate books, the voice of each period of Ró's life being appropriately vastly different. There's the story of being in school, of a kind of young, uncertain love and the glee of finding your person after years of feeling unlovable. There's the young adult years of not knowing how to make a life but waking up every day anyway. And then there's the quest to right all the wrongs of the previous years in the approach to middle age. How some things have changed to be unrecognizable and others are circles that will always be repeated.
While I enjoyed the book the whole time, there was an urgency that fell on the story from around page 126, and from that point on, I couldn't put the book down. To fit so much in under 300 pages, Kennedy has to orchestrate a fair amount of jumping through time, skipping weeks or months between scenes and then large chunks of years as the book goes on. And she does an interesting thing with this. She begins each scene as if we've been there the whole time and understand the full context of each new version of Ró's world. There's no explaining what was missed. There's no holding the reader's hands. You're left to context clue you're way into a sketchy picture of the omitted segments. I think this is the correct choice, a powerful one and one that trusts the reader in a way that is important. But it does, inevitably, create momentary confusion. There were plenty of times were I muddled on for a few pages feeling a little lost, like I'd missed some tiny sign on the trail and might never find my way back to it. But I always did. And this choice made the book feel more raw, more real. Kennedy does an incredible job mirroring Ró's mental state in the prose in an almost effortless way that takes such an immense amount of talent to pull off. What is unsaid, the hand that is not held, creates a vacuum of space in the novel. Necessary space. The craft is so strong that leaving the raw hems adds to the character of the story. This is a patchy, stitched together life, and Kennedy does not go easy on Ró or the reader. She is not one to give an unearned relief, rushed in the final pages. It is not hopelessly bleak, but it is life. She's not going to fix it up real pretty for the sake of saving feelings.
I don't want to spoil the ending, but the circularity that Kennedy crafts in the final chapters is incredibly moving, reminding the reader of everything Ró's been through and the different ways she's processed this time.
I finished the book with my heart twisting for Red, genuinely wanting to write the author to say thank you and also wanting to google all the interviews she's done for the book and look for clues as to what might be beyond the final page. Rarely do I get this feeling. I'm usually in the camp that the world of the book ends on the final page. I am still mentally stuck in Stations and with these characters. But, beyond that, the book made me think of my own life. To go internal. To reflect. Which I think is the mark of great art. When someone's story can lead you back into yourself.
Overall: 4.5
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