Trespass

by D.J. Taylor

George Chell sits in a Suffolk hotel trying to understand his past. As he searches for the sense in his unexplained life - from stifling childhood on a Norwich housing estate to precarious prosperity in the City - he must also cope with the mysteries of the Caradon hotel and its odd proprietor.

335 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 1998

About the author

David John Taylor (born 1960) is a critic, novelist and biographer. After attending school in Norwich, he read Modern History at St John's College, Oxford, and has received the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award for his life of George Orwell.

He lives in Norwich and contributes to The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman and The Spectator among other publications.

He is married to the novelist Rachel Hore, and together they have three sons.

Reviews

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is nice really the quality a book should be pleased with? If so, Trespass would be thrilled, it is perfectly nice, immensely affable and yet thoroughly unexceptional. It's a well written picaresque of sorts that reads very much like a classic in that elegant way of half a page sentences constructed together to tell a tale of a young man from inauspicious lower class upbringing who marries into a middle class situation, then finds himself unwittingly assisting in a financial scheme that has his hobnobbing with the upper classes. All of which is narrated by him in his present, somewhat reduced circumstances of a solitary life in a small resort town hotel. Basically it's a story of a social climb, by someone who is enough of an interloper to warrant his actions named as trespass, and as such it's an interesting enough, because no society is genuinely egalitarian enough not to have a distinct class structure and this is a good portrayal of an English one. Despite the quality of writing and an occasional surprise or two, there is something genuinely mild and unexciting (very British in a way) about it. It read much longer than it was, occasionally dragged and at times was positively soporific, the last sentence reading appropriately enough Sleep came at last. Pleasant, though not particularly impressive of a read.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is most special about this novel is what it doesn’t do, what it could have been, but isn’t. It could have been another novel about a self-made magnate, who he really was, what he became, and how he fell down, as told by a nobody. It also could have been a postmodern version of such a story, where the story is really about the nobody’s relationship with the woman assigned to help him tell this story. But it’s neither of these and yet, to some extent, both. It’s its own thing, and this is hard to do with such a well-worn story.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very enjoyable and pleasant read, although I’m not sure that it amounted to very much in the end. It’s the story of a former right-hand man of a disgraced city tycoon. George Chell now sits in a Suffolk hotel looking back over his past, his rise and fall, his relationship with his tycoon uncle, his marriage, and by slowly unravelling all that happened comes to some sort of reconciliation and understanding. Very much a novel of class and the idea of “trespass” outside of your allotted place in society, there are many bleakly humorous incidents and character sketches. The writing is clear and concise, and the dialogue shows Taylor’s acute ear for social nuance. Some of the characters are particularly memorable. George Chells’s mother is one such, totally limited in her horizon and outlook, and yet even she turns out to have had her hour in the sun. The sense of time and place is very vividly portrayed, and I enjoyed the level of detail of everyday life. So overall a good read, but perhaps not a very memorable one.