The greatest outrage expressed by society when this news story broke was over the surveillance of people like Tess: white middle-class activists whose main concern was road-building. There is much else to praise in Trespass. Clark rises to the challenge of imagining what a story like this would do to a child the emotional violence visited on Mia simply by the facts of her birth. These lies, piled on top of each other, exert an extraordinary pressure on the excellently written character of Mia. Theirs is a mother-daughter bond put under intense pressure by the ghosts of the past, and by the fact that, as an attempt to protect her daughter from the shame of abandonment, Tess has told Mia her father died. The novel is most successful in dramatising the relationship between Tess and Mia. She sets out to reach back into her past and understand who this man really was, at the same time as Mia, now aged 12, begins her own search to understand the story of her father. It becomes clear to Tess that the man she loved must have been an undercover officer.
When a death in the family brings to light the appalling truth that this man, whom Tess knew as Dave, had in fact stolen the identity of a dead child and was not who he claimed to be, a grimly inevitable unravelling ensues. Trespass tells the story of Tess, a former environmental activist, and Mia, the daughter she had with another activist who became violent and unstable during Tess’s pregnancy and then disappeared shortly before Mia was born.
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