Uneven Peace: Spatial Memory in Kennedy’s Trespasses and Magee’s Close to Home

Abstract

This paper examines how Belfast is inhabited in Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (2022) and Michael Magee’s Close to Home (2023), novels set in 1975 and 2013. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s account of spatial practice, and using spatial memory as a supporting concept, it asks how division is encountered through ordinary acts of walking, crossing, mapping, and remembering. The transition from conflict to post-conflict Belfast, it argues, is not represented as a movement from division to reconciliation. In Trespasses, sectarian telling, surveillance, and gendered scrutiny organise everyday mobility with immediate force. In Close to Home, these conflict-era spatial structures have partly receded but remain available for reactivation, while their afterlives intersect with insecure housing, cultural exclusion, class inequality, and uneven mobility. Uneven peace, a term adapted here from peace studies, names this condition: reduced political violence and greater physical mobility coexisting with unequal access to housing, opportunity, and urban belonging. The paper further accounts for the novels’ different retrospective positions. Kennedy’s reconstruction of 1975 and Magee’s of 2013 do not simply represent memory; they participate in producing Belfast as a remembered urban space.