In brief: According to her son, his new girlfriend is ‘different’ and ‘very serious’. Chloe sees lots of dark hair, dark eyes, and sharp features as she moves across the room towards her. She has arranged to meet Toby and the new girl – Salome – in a nice restaurant she knows Toby likes but it isn’t long before Chloe is wishing her son had chosen someone like the bright-eyed waitress for his girlfriend rather than Salome.

When Chloe tells her husband Brendan about the meal later, she can’t bear to talk of Salome for too long. She just gives him the important bits – Salome is a Croat and daughter of Louisiana’s ‘Oyster King’. She’s also abrupt, and made Chloe feel ‘creepy’. Not the most auspicious start, Brendan feels.

Chloe is an illustrator and has to take the rough with the smooth. The last job was tedious in the extreme, but the next will be exciting and she is longing to immerse herself in the new engravings, but first – kettle on. As she settles into her reading chair, she is jolted by the sound of a rifle shot. The report was very close – on her land – in her wood. As she rises her thoughts turn to the doe she had spooked on the way to the studio. Damn the trespassing hunter!

Brendan is jolted from the Fifth Crusade by the shots. He’d only just got going as well. Thoughts of his wife and his son had occupied his morning so far. This Salome at least sounded different, but he knows that no one would ever be good enough for Chloe’s only child – storm clouds gather on the horizon.

It’s the Marxist Macalister that is troubling Toby. Is he a threat? The way that Salome is whispering to him, resting her hand on his arm. This is a new one for Toby; he has never faced rejection before. Is he just imagining something?

The first thing Chloe meets after crashing from the porch is a not very attractive dog. Mind you, he’s not unfriendly and comes trotting up. The same cannot be said of the dog’s owner when he appears through the undergrowth. In a heavy foreign accent he apologises for trespassing, but points out that he needs the rabbits he hunts for food – she doesn’t. Chloe’s legs tremble as she walks away. Toby and Salome are coming for the weekend. They have something they want to discuss apparently. As they show Salome round, they discover a rabbit’s head by the studio. It seems the storm clouds have rolled closer and it’s getting darker in Chloe’s world.

About the author

Valerie Martin was born in Missouri in 1948, and raised in New Orleans. She lived in Italy for three years, and now lives in upstate New York.

She is the author of eight novels including Italian Fever, Property (which won the Orange prize) and Mary Reilly and three short story collections, the most recent of which is The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories. She has also written a non-fiction study of St Francis of Assisi – Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St Francis. Her novel Mary Reilly was filmed by Stephen Frears and starred Julia Roberts and John Malkovich.

The story behind Trespass

“It was 2004 and, for some mysterious reason, I was thinking about war. I’d finished my novel Property, set in the 19th century, and I wanted to leave the past behind and try my hand at something contemporary, something that wouldn’t require so much research. I knew I didn’t want to write about terrorists, but I was interested in how Americans responded to terrorism, which is very different from the way Europeans respond. Expressions like ‘the war on Terror’, bandied about in the press, struck me as peculiarly American and made my hair stand on end. It seemed, apart from our freedoms, language itself was under attack.

At that time I lived in an old farmhouse in upstate New York with seven acres of neglected woods behind it. When I bought the house these woods seemed inviting – I pictured myself walking around communing with trees, building a writing studio where I would have no phone or even electricity. Before long I understood that these things would not happen. I couldn’t afford to build the studio and walking in the woods was unpleasant because of the underbrush. In the fall of our first year, the property was invaded by a darker tenant than the deer and the occasional sound of gunfire disrupted our serenity. We heard it at odd, dim hours, 5 am, or just before dark. We had a poacher.

For a while I tried to ignore it but one day as I was standing in the yard, I heard gunfire very near. That does it! I thought and charged into the woods where, in short order, I came upon first the dog and then the man himself. He wasnt a very threatening-looking fellow and I spoke to him politely at first, informing him that our land was posted. His reply was something not quite English and his action was to slink away. I turned back thinking two things at once: first, that he could shoot me if he felt like it, and second, that I couldnt identify his accent. I had also made up my mind that I wanted him off my land.

Until I owned a wood thoughts like these had never crossed my mind. Who does this guy think he is, shooting rabbits on my land? Those are my rabbits! What if he shoots the cat! And so on. Listening to myself gave me a headache. Was it possible that owning land I didnt use put me in a morally compromising position, one that left me puffed up with anger and self-righteousness?

This was the first experience that led to my novel. The second came to me indirectly, through a chance remark. A friend and I were talking about New Orleans food, and he said that the oyster fishermen down the river in Plaquemines parish were mostly Croatians. Croats in Louisiana? How did they get there? A little research revealed that the first wave of Croatians arrived on those marshy shores in the early part of the 20th century, just before the Great War, and that they had maintained their connection to the motherland, receiving another wave of refugees in the early 90s, when the former Yugoslavia began to fall apart.

I wondered about this refugee community in Louisiana, and whether the people there held onto their language and national identity. So on a visit to my home town of New Orleans, I persuaded a friend to go on a little research trip down the river. On a cool, gray, November day, we set out to explore the hamlets of Pointe la Hache (which I had always been curious about as it was the town where my maternal grandmother grew up), Bohemia, Empire, and, if we got that far, Venice. I hardly need to tell you that these towns are simply gone now. At that time they werent exactly thriving. Pointe la Hache was a burnt-out court house and a dozen houses, Bohemia was a closed-up country store, but Empire was a real town, with a charming neat white church on the lawn of which Our Lady of Medjugorje stood contemplating her own patiently folded hands. This was it. We were in the land of Yugos.

We had been told that there was a marina outside of Empire where the oysterman unloaded the bounty of the Gulf of Mexico. It didnt take long to find it and we pulled into the shell-strewn parking lot. We went out and stood near a truck, discussing whether we should go to the dock and try to strike up a conversation. But before we arrived at a strategy, a very large man carrying a canvas sack came sauntering towards us. He eyed us closely as he approached, clearly curious as to what two older ladies were doing in such a place we hadnt seen another woman since leaving Empire. As he threw the bag into the truck he gave a shrug that could have been a greeting.

Excuse me, my friend said, pointing toward a barge-like fortress of a boat pulled up at the dock. Is that an oyster lugger?

Yah, he said. Thats a lugger. He had an accent as thick as a board. Do you like oysters?

Oh, yes, she said. Were from New Orleans.

He pulled a small knife with a curved blade from somewhere near his waist and cut the heavy string on the canvas bag. You will try these, fresh from water.

And so began an amazing conversation during which I asked questions and our informant answered, all the while opening shell after shell and pouring the slimy contents down my dear friends throat. Louisiana oysters are big, and she smiled and swallowed and encouraged him to open yet another. She told me later shed never tasted anything like them; they were cold from the water and tasted of brine. Meanwhile I learned that our oystermans name was Josef Major, not, you might think, a Croatian name, but it turned out it was spelled m-a-g-y-a-r, the name of the fierce nomadic tribes that swept down upon medieval Europe from the Eurasian plains. At one point I asked, Are you Croatian and he replied, somewhat taken aback, How do you know this? He told us all about the oyster business, the leases he held where the oysters were seeded until they were ready to be harvested, and he waved his big paw toward the water just as a cattle rancher might indicate his bellowing herds; there were his underwater pastures, where the oysters roamed and the shrimp and the pompano played. He also told me he had a daughter in college in Dubrovnik.

She tells me, Papa, why are you there in Louisiana, you should come back to your country, but I say, I must stay here and make money to pay for your college. He was touchingly proud of his daughter.

We thanked him heartily and stumbled to the car. Hes the one, I said. Hes the Oyster King.

A complex history began to unspool in my imagination, a history of refugees and solid American citizens, of a recent war and an impending one, of a bright world in which the threat of the unknown, of the foreigner, the stranger, forever lurks in the shadows, threatening the fragile security of those fortunate enough to live in the realms of light.

Valerie Martin

For discussion

• In the very first paragraph of the novel, the author prepares us for Salome. How does she do this?
• Why ‘Salome’?
• ‘Well, perhaps since she doesn’t have a mother, she wants to be one.’ Do you think Brendon is right? Or does it tell us more of Brendon than Salome?
• ‘He has arrived at the source of her foreignness.’ How is the theme of foreignness explored in the novel?
• ‘Living near the forest doesn’t mean we must go exploring there.’ Is this how Brendon lives his life? Is it also a wider observation?
• ‘She is now and always has been innocent.’ Is this true of Chloe?
• How does the author view Europe?
• ‘Like so many men, he wanted to have a secret life.’ Is this true do you think?
• ‘Your mother wants to buy me a new axe, but I never see one I like better than this one.’ What does this tell us of Brendan and Chloe?
• ‘How clear moral choices are to the young.’ Why?
• What is the significance of birds in the novel?
• How many sorts of trespassing are there in the novel?

Suggested further reading

The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
Croatia: A Nation Forged in War by Marcus Tanner
Away by Amy Bloom
They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulic
The Road Home by Rose Tremain