Mary Costello’s 'Barcelona': A Review

Barcelona is Irish writer Mary Costello’s second collection of short stories and fourth

work of fiction. Representative of many Irish narratives, where stories are shrouded

in the thick cloud of a forthcoming civil war or still reverberating from its aftermath,

Costello’s collection attests to a brooding kind of darkness. Her work is a gritty,

unflinching realism; words act as a testament to the sheer bruteness of human

existence.

Yet in spite of, or maybe because of, the darkness, Irish narratives often retain a

beauty that evinces humanity’s strength. The will to transcend, to carve out meaning

within the painful banalities of everyday life, remains the lasting impression of

Costello’s writing.

Barcelona consists of nine short stories, many of which depart from the popular

narrative trope of framing the world through binary oppositions, where good and evil

are presented as opposing forces. Instead, Costello’s narratives tend to offer no

clear protagonist or antagonist. Perpetrators and victims swap and share roles,

enmeshed in acts of violence and loving that appear to blur morality entirely.

In ‘The Choc-Ice Woman’, the secret life of Frances’s husband, Frank, reveals a

dimension of cold cruelty beneath his otherwise conciliatory demeanour. But it is

cruelty born from cruelty, the physical manifestations of a childhood characterised by

violence.

Costello does not justify actions – she explains them. She denies her readers an

easy evaluation of her characters; there is no neat, reductive box into which we can

fit our more palatable theories of human nature.

One character in ‘At the Gate’ – also named Mary Costello – reflects upon the

dysfunctional dynamics of her and her husband’s relationship after he (begrudgingly)

attends a book reading by one of her favourite authors. She thinks:

‘I understand his little put-downs for what they are: unconscious attempts at

self-preservation, half-conscious attempts to hold back fear or mitigate loss,

and they are all forgivable.’

Costello’s prose weaves together narratives that characterise the complexities of the

human consciousness: nobody is entirely good; nobody is entirely bad. Within

moments of rage and disconnection, language breathes nuance and understanding.

Her command of prose is often harrowing, with themes of violence enacted against

animals recurring within six of the nine stories. This violence tends to mirror violence

towards the humans in her fiction, drawing uncomfortable and confronting similarities

between animal and human suffering.

One character in ‘Barcelona’ recounts a previous, formative relationship with an ex-

partner. The ex-partner had witnessed the cruelty of abattoirs and animal slaughters

throughout his childhood and it scarred him so deeply that he became irretrievable, a

lost soul whose early death still haunts the protagonist. Catherine, the speaker,

watches her current partner, David, stare at her as she explains the impact of the

man’s life and death ‘with wide-open eyes.’ She thinks there is a glint of mercy in

them, ‘But then a look of bafflement, of dread, [begins] to take hold.’ David cannot

understand her; the distance between them is palpable.

It is so often this space between characters, the vastness of the unspoken, the

weight of the misunderstandings and confusion, that resonates so deeply.

In ‘Deus Absconditus’, Martin takes the Eurostar to Paris to meet up with a son he

rarely sees. In subtle, quietly devastating ways, in ways that feel unbeknownst to the

narrator himself, he tries to reconnect with his son, John, over dinner.

He reflects upon John’s seemingly supernatural powers when he was a small child,

an ‘uncanny’ kind of ‘gift’. He does not know when those powers disappeared, or if

John even remembers having them at all. He ponders:

‘When we remove ourselves from a certain state of being…we lose our powers.

Maybe the ordinary musk of life settles on us and cannot be rinsed away.’

Haunting, evocative, Costello’s writing speaks to what it means to be human, to

carve meaning into the world, to buckle or to prosper beneath the weight of such a

task.

Words & Images by Lucy McLaughlin, she/her