Barcelona by Mary Costello review – haunting tales of what can’t be said | Short stories

There’s a moment in the title story of this beautiful, quietly shattering collection when the protagonist recalls being with an ex-boyfriend: “She almost wished to return to those times, to the fidelity of being she had felt then, the streaming across into each other, the mornings spent in bed when a thought that might have been his became hers.” This luminous image of union is in sharp contrast with the lonely disconnection not only of the protagonist’s current relationship, but of all relationships in this book.

Barcelona is the second collection of short stories and fourth work of fiction from the award-winning Irish writer Mary Costello. Most take place in Ireland and they all centre on Irish characters, many of whom have moved on from farming backgrounds to pursue educated careers: a librarian, a copy editor, an academic. The brutality of the Irish civil war – “You know how it was, brother against brother, father against son” – reverberates in the background, along with other wars, as Costello explores the violence behind painful silences in domestic life.

The relationships portrayed in these haunting, powerful stories include marriages fallen into rhythms of uncommunicative coexistence. Costello also explores disjuncture in parent-child relationships, as at the close to the final story, The Killing Line: “How could I tell my father that he and my mother might have been better off remaining childless, or that I might have been better off not being born, or, at least, not being born to them?”

This question “How could I tell …?” could be asked in each of these nine stories, as silences are probed to uncover what can’t be said. Her untellable, unsayable subject is cruelty – be that towards one another, or towards animals: cattle, dogs, frogs, horses. Costello has cited The Lives of Animals, a landmark book about animal rights by JM Coetzee, as a key influence, and its concerns are felt throughout (Coetzee even appears as a character in At the Gate). The protagonist of the title story, Barcelona, directly echoes Coetzee’s recurring character Elizabeth Costello in describing her father’s cattle being taken to the abattoir as “a holocaust … And we are all complicit.” In My Little Pyromaniac, the narrator witnesses an ex-boyfriend hitting his dog: “He swung his open palm and struck the side of her head with great force. Before she knew what had happened, before her head had righted itself, he struck again, and she yelped and slunk away into the shadows.” The female pronoun makes this easily read as man against woman – another instance in which the author invites us to read violence against animals as akin to that against humans.

When the narrator of Deus Absconditus sees a man crying, he immediately thinks, “Who did this to you?”, only to wonder later: “Why had he assumed his suffering had been inflicted by others? He might have done something himself, some crime.” The slippage between inflicted upon and inflictor is a recurring consideration. In The Choc-Ice Woman, Frances remembers being so frustrated with her husband Frank’s passivity that she forced him to disclose that his foster father “was a brute to everyone and everything”, shooting their dog because he “knocked over a bucket of milk, that’s why. That’s what anger does.” Frances also discovered that seemingly peaceable Frank is a serial adulterer, infecting her with chlamydia and thereby making her infertile. The victim of one brutality becomes perpetrator of another. In turn, Frances doesn’t tell Frank that he’s carrying the disease.

Occasionally, amid complex chains of cruelty, Costello offers transcendent moments of completeness: “I had the odd sensation of time altering and light moving around my head … a sensation, like deja vu, but one in which I perceived everything concurrently. Present time disintegrated, and past, present and future coexisted. For a moment I had a knowledge of eternity.” The narrator of At the Gate goes on to compare this extraordinary sensation to that experienced by a narrator in a Borges story. She reflects: “At the end, he cried with compassion for the inconceivable universe.”

There’s a moment in the title story of this beautiful, quietly shattering collection when the protagonist recalls being with an ex-boyfriend: “She almost wished to return to those times, to the fidelity of being she had felt then, the streaming across into each other, the mornings spent in bed when a thought that might have been his became hers.” This luminous image of union is in sharp contrast with the lonely disconnection not only of the protagonist’s current relationship, but of all relationships in this book.

Barcelona is the second collection of short stories and fourth work of fiction from the award-winning Irish writer Mary Costello. Most take place in Ireland and they all centre on Irish characters, many of whom have moved on from farming backgrounds to pursue educated careers: a librarian, a copy editor, an academic. The brutality of the Irish civil war – “You know how it was, brother against brother, father against son” – reverberates in the background, along with other wars, as Costello explores the violence behind painful silences in domestic life.

The relationships portrayed in these haunting, powerful stories include marriages fallen into rhythms of uncommunicative coexistence. Costello also explores disjuncture in parent-child relationships, as at the close to the final story, The Killing Line: “How could I tell my father that he and my mother might have been better off remaining childless, or that I might have been better off not being born, or, at least, not being born to them?”

This question “How could I tell …?” could be asked in each of these nine stories, as silences are probed to uncover what can’t be said. Her untellable, unsayable subject is cruelty – be that towards one another, or towards animals: cattle, dogs, frogs, horses. Costello has cited The Lives of Animals, a landmark book about animal rights by JM Coetzee, as a key influence, and its concerns are felt throughout (Coetzee even appears as a character in At the Gate). The protagonist of the title story, Barcelona, directly echoes Coetzee’s recurring character Elizabeth Costello in describing her father’s cattle being taken to the abattoir as “a holocaust … And we are all complicit.” In My Little Pyromaniac, the narrator witnesses an ex-boyfriend hitting his dog: “He swung his open palm and struck the side of her head with great force. Before she knew what had happened, before her head had righted itself, he struck again, and she yelped and slunk away into the shadows.” The female pronoun makes this easily read as man against woman – another instance in which the author invites us to read violence against animals as akin to that against humans.

When the narrator of Deus Absconditus sees a man crying, he immediately thinks, “Who did this to you?”, only to wonder later: “Why had he assumed his suffering had been inflicted by others? He might have done something himself, some crime.” The slippage between inflicted upon and inflictor is a recurring consideration. In The Choc-Ice Woman, Frances remembers being so frustrated with her husband Frank’s passivity that she forced him to disclose that his foster father “was a brute to everyone and everything”, shooting their dog because he “knocked over a bucket of milk, that’s why. That’s what anger does.” Frances also discovered that seemingly peaceable Frank is a serial adulterer, infecting her with chlamydia and thereby making her infertile. The victim of one brutality becomes perpetrator of another. In turn, Frances doesn’t tell Frank that he’s carrying the disease.

Occasionally, amid complex chains of cruelty, Costello offers transcendent moments of completeness: “I had the odd sensation of time altering and light moving around my head … a sensation, like deja vu, but one in which I perceived everything concurrently. Present time disintegrated, and past, present and future coexisted. For a moment I had a knowledge of eternity.” The narrator of At the Gate goes on to compare this extraordinary sensation to that experienced by a narrator in a Borges story. She reflects: “At the end, he cried with compassion for the inconceivable universe.”