38 pages • 1-hour read
The Trespasser
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Themes
Parental Abandonment
The theme of parental abandonment dominates the novel. Both Conway and Aislinn were abandoned by their fathers. The critical difference lies in how each character chooses to react to that experience. When she was still young, Conway made up fantasy stories about who her father really was. After a certain age, she put aside those stories and dismissed her absent father as unimportant in her life: “I grew up and […] realized this is my real life, and I’d bleeding well better start running it myself, instead of waiting for someone else to do the job for me. That’s what grown-ups do” (176-77). When Conway’s father does show up midway through the novel, she sends him away. She has a life of her own that doesn’t include him. Conway also feels contempt for anyone who puts their own life on hold waiting for an absent parent to come back.
Aislinn's attitude is the mirror opposite of Conway’s. When Aislinn’s father disappears, she returns to Missing Persons each year for updates, long after the case has gone cold. Both Aislinn and her mother have allowed their own lives to come to a dead stop after the disappearance. In the case of Aislinn’s mother, her life doesn’t simply freeze after the abandonment; it comes to an end. Aislinn goes on without her, concocting fantasies about what might have really happened to her father. Unlike Conway, Aislinn indulges in these fantasies as a grown woman and refuses to let them go.
The two women cross paths while Conway is working in Missing Persons. Aislinn pleads for any new information about her father, but Conway brushes her off. Conway’s failure to be a sympathetic listener stems from her anger at her own father. She projects her own need to dismiss abandonment onto Aislinn with disastrous consequences. Conway’s callous indifference becomes the catalyst for Aislinn’s dangerous scheme to seduce the necessary information out of McCann. Later on in the novel, Conway realizes that her own baggage related to abandonment may have ultimately caused Aislinn’s death. However, she avoids thinking too deeply about her own culpability for the murder.
Ownership
Conway is obsessed with self-ownership. This theme echoes faintly in Conway’s comment that Aislinn needs to claim ownership of her own life rather than waiting for her father to return and do it for her. However, Conway also asserts her own fear that someone else will come to “own” her. Conway is deeply suspicious of Breslin’s motives in taking her under his wing. He functions as a surrogate father in the department and offers to smooth her path with the detectives who are giving her a hard time. She rejects his assistance because he wants to rescue her. In Conway’s mind, she equates rescue with ownership:
You’re the poor struggling loser/helpless damsel/plucky sidekick who was saved from danger/dishonor/humiliation by the brilliant brave compassionate hero/heroine, and they get to decide which, because you’re not the one running this story, not any more (256).
Conway interprets her father’s offer of assistance in the same way. When he returns and says he’ll answer any questions she has about him, this would allow him to reshape, or “own,” the narrative of her life: “If I let him give me the answers, he’ll own me. Everything in my life, past and future, will be his: what he decides to make it into” (300).
Conway is equally suspicious of her colleagues. She believes that they want to force her out of the squad by spreading the story that she is an abrasive loner who can’t work with anybody. In essence, they would reshape and claim her story. Conway even projects her obsession with ownership onto McCann when she accuses him of wanting to “own” Aislinn’s mother, Evelyn: “Be honest with yourself, McCann: […] You couldn’t have Evelyn, but you loved the thought that you owned the rest of her life” (403). Because of Conway’s personal baggage and paranoia, she fails to see other motives in the people around her. Until her final epiphany late in the novel, the problem of ownership is at the forefront of her consciousness.
Inner Stories
There is only one set of facts related to Aislinn’s murder. However, the major characters in the novel draw a variety of conclusions about reality based on nothing more than the stories they weave in their own imaginations. Conway initially makes assumptions about Aislinn based on Conway’s own self-talk about abandonment. Conway feels contempt for someone like Aislinn who would wait around for her father to come home. As a result, she sees Aislinn as a mindless bimbo. It isn’t until very late in the novel that Conway realizes how much of what she’s seeing is a projection of her own beliefs.
Conway makes a similar mistake when it comes to her colleagues. Based on her childhood experiences of being rejected—first by her father, and later by her schoolmates—she assumes the other detectives on the squad are out to get her: “I was so busy bracing myself to fight anyone who was out to sink me or own me or generally use me as his very own dollhouse dolly, it never occurred to me that this might not be about me to begin with” (313).
Breslin indulges in a high degree of self-delusion because he can’t bring himself to believe that McCann, his friend and partner, is guilty. Instead, Breslin invents a theory to account for Aislinn’s murder that manages to keep McCann in the clear: “Breslin is used to being the good guy, any story that gets room in his head has to grow out of that beginning. […] All of us Ds know, certain sure, we’re the good guys” (420). McCann, too, has concocted a story in which he casts himself as a romantic hero: “He wanted to see himself riding down the green hill with light flashing off his spear, doing battle to save the world from itself” (350). Aislinn, of course, is the biggest offender in terms of delusional self-talk. She sees herself as an outraged innocent who is justified in exacting revenge by destroying McCann. Conway finally articulates the problem when she sees it for what it is: “Another story. […] Victims, witnesses, killers, Ds, all frantically spinning stories to keep the world the way they want it, dragging them over our heads” (435). Unlike the others, Conway snaps out of her self-destructive storyline in time to save herself.
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