Barcelona by Mary Costello

The award-winning Irish writer Mary Costello seems equally at home with novels and short stories. Her deeply affecting novella, Academy Street, was one of my favourite reads in 2015, while her first collection of short fiction, The China Factory, has also been highly praised. Barcelona – Costello’s second story collection – comprises nine pieces exploring the distances between people, how fault lines can develop in the closest relationships, and our capacity for cruelty towards loved ones and animals. Here we have stories of husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and former lovers – quietly devastating snapshots of life, beautifully conveyed with insight and precision.

As is often the case with such collections, some stories will resonate more strongly than others, but the very best of these are outstanding, very much in the style of Claire Keegan’s and William Trevor’s short fiction. Interestingly, several of these stories feature people in transit – on a city break in Barcelona, taking the Eurostar to Paris or accompanying a deceased relative home for the funeral. Nevertheless, it’s the emotional journeys or realisations Costello’s characters experience that give these stories their depth.

In the titular piece, David and Catherine have travelled to Barcelona to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary, but we soon learn that the trip was David’s idea – if anything, Catherine would have preferred Granada. Sadly, pretty much everything about the holiday serves to emphasise the disconnection Catherine feels in her marriage, from David’s reckless driving en route to the city to his choice of porn movies as ‘entertainment’ to his suggestion of catching a bullfight during their stay. It’s as if David is taunting Catherine, knowing full well her abhorrence of animal cruelty.

She looked at David’s waiting face. He was no longer mysterious to her. She watched him talking sometimes, eating and drinking with gusto, bouncing through life on the solid ground beneath him, and she was struck by the distance that exists between people. How everything, the details of everyone’s hidden life, far exceeds anything we can possibly imagine. (p. 6)

At the Gate explores a similar theme, highlighting the fault lines in a strained, stagnating marriage. In this piece, a literary teacher – whose surname is ‘Costello’ – travels with her husband, Peter, to see the South African writer J. M. Coetzee at a book festival. As Coetzee takes questions from the audience, Peter – who has little interest in books himself – becomes increasingly irritated by the speaker’s behaviour, triggering a series of disturbing visions for his wife. There are echoes of Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello here, which seems to be a touchstone for Mary Costello’s advocacy of animal rights. 

In My Little Pyromaniac, a single woman realises she has moved next door to her former boyfriend, Kevin, and his new family. The woman, who also narrates the story, went out with Kevin while she was at university – but now, twenty years on, she has cause to recall her relationship with this man almost twenty years her senior.

There was something about Kevin – an arrogance, an authority, a furtiveness too. He was a man used to getting his own way, a man who might send out secret signs and demands to women, and expect them to acquiesce. (p. 56)

As the narrator observes Kevin mistreating the family pet, a beautiful German Shepherd, she realises how lucky she was to get away from him back then. Otherwise, she could be living this life now – that could be her house, her children and her dog on the other side of the fence. It’s a chilling thought, prompting the woman to take drastic action. It’s one of my favourite pieces in the collection, playing out with just the right amount of jeopardy and ambiguity as it draws to a close.

The standout story here is also the longest, a masterclass in construction and the gradual, measured reveal. Costello has an innate ability to portray a sense of separateness or alienation in a relationship, a skill she puts to excellent effect here. First published in the New Yorker, The Choc-Ice Woman focuses on Frances, a retired librarian in her mid-sixties, accompanying her deceased brother’s body on the drive from Dublin to the family’s farm in the country. In the silences between brief exchanges with the undertaker, Frances reflects on the key people in her life – most significantly, how her brother, Dennis (the deceased), withdrew from society in his youth, and her husband, Frank, whom she now knows to be a ‘serial adulterer’.

Service stations – along with shopping centres and suburban housing estates – were, Frances used to imagine, one of his pick-up spots for women. She’d picture him [Frank] parking off to the side, near the service area, with his tea and breakfast roll, the racing page open on the steering wheel, keeping an eye out for a lone woman emerging from the shop, then tracking her until she – game, like him, for a motorway fling – met his eye. (p. 78)

This brilliant, penetrating story taps into another couple of Costello’s key themes – namely, trust and the inscrutable nature of others. How well can we ever know those closest to us? What secrets are they concealing, and will we ever be able to trust them again? Frank’s covert behaviour has left Frances with a general mistrust of others, especially men. For all she knows, Mr O’Shea, the undertaker sitting next to her in the hearse, could be a serial adulterer, too.

Maybe you’re one too, she thought. If I were a different woman, younger, more attractive – or maybe not even attractive, but capable of giving off a certain signal – would he be game too? If I indicated availability and secreted the right pheromones he might at any minute exit the motorway, drive down a forest track or quiet lane – because he would know all the forest tracks and quiet lanes – and there might be some talk or laughter, and maybe a little awkwardness as he unbuckled, and then he would do it and I would let him, with my dead brother lying there, inches from our heads (p. 104)

Costello excels in treading the fine line between tragedy and black comedy here. There’s even a brief worry that the undertaker might have put the wrong body in Dennis’ coffin as the deceased looked younger than seventy-six, the age Frances happens to mention during the journey!

Fans of Costello’s Academy Street and Colm Tóbín’s Brooklyn will love Assignation, one of my favourite pieces in this collection. This melancholy story features Marion, an Irish girl working as a housemaid for a wealthy American family in NYC in the late 1930s. When a friend arranges a date for Marion with her cousin, Michael, Marion realises it might be her best chance of securing a marriage. But as the meeting approaches, a horrific incident from Marion’s past resurfaces, colouring her view of men and their unknowable qualities.

This is her chance. Michael Lawlor might be her only chance. But what does she know of him? She does not know if he is cruel or kind, or soft, or manly. She knows nothing of his private life, or the private life of any man. She takes a deep breath. He is, from what she knows, a good man. She will have a home, children. She will have fine rugs and velvet curtains. But how to get to that point, how to know what to do now, this minute. How to know what to say, when to smile, how to hide the shame. Because he will know. A man will know. (p. 126)

The collection ends with another standout story, The Killing Line, in which Oliver reflects on his deceased father’s life working the family farm. Oliver’s father, Paddy, was just thirteen when he left school to work the land, sacrificing his own promising future for the benefit of the family. So, while his siblings went to college, ultimately securing good jobs, Paddy missed out on a proper education, a handicap that often left him feeling exposed when the family were together.

Paddy always hoped that Oliver would join him on the farm, but a childhood trip to the abattoir left an inedible mark on the boy. Now with Paddy gone, Oliver’s mother chides her son for rejecting everything his father had stood for while alive. It’s an excellent story, a crushing exploration of the tensions between an individual’s personal values and beliefs – in this instance, animal rights – and familial pressures and obligations. A quietly devastating end to a very striking collection.

Barcelona is published by Canongate; my thanks to the publishers and Independent Alliance for kindly providing a review copy.