Unlike most writers, Mary Costello was reluctant to accept the vocation. Previously a full-time primary schoolteacher, she would try to suppress stories, but they would “kind of push up”, she once told The Irish Times. Her debut collection, The China Factory (2012), which was published when she was in her mid-40s, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and an Irish Book Award. It was followed by the Irish Book Award-winning Academy Street (2014), a tale of an Irish emigree in New York that rivals Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. Then came The River Capture (2019), a Joycean homage, and another short-story collection, Barcelona (2024), which justly drew comparisons to Claire Keegan.
Like Keegan, Costello works slowly, taking time to chisel her sentences into a “spare and honest” style, as she describes it. Certain themes recur: animal cruelty (she is a long-time vegetarian despite – or perhaps because of – having grown up on a beef farm in east Galway), infidelity, miscarriage. Her protagonists are often bookish transplants from the country who are squeamish about eating meat. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” she says on the subject, quoting Flaubert. But despite her characters’ gentleness, the stories often feature violence, whether overtly or beneath the surface.
In this regard, A Beautiful Loan is no different. Told in the first-person present tense – a departure from Costello’s usual third person – the novel features Anna, a 45-year-old Irish woman, who grew up on a farm in Galway, considering her adult life, having starting out as a schoolteacher in Dublin. The look back is an attempt to determine “why we do what we do, or tolerate what we tolerate, or love who we love”, she tells us.
At 19, Anna meets 35-year-old Peter, the man who will become her husband, at a nightclub. In her drunkenness, she loses her virginity to him, which she barely remembers the next day. In 1985 Ireland, getting pregnant was a fate “worse maybe than death”. Filled with shame, she feels she must make it “mean something”, so the two begin dating and eventually marry.
READ MORE
Anna takes great joy in music and literature, referencing Camus, Joyce and Jung, among others. Quietly bullying, Peter isolates Anna from her friends and family. He is dismissive of her intellectual pursuits and often leaves her alone on weekends to go climbing. She has two failed pregnancies, one of which is a stillbirth at 25 weeks. When Peter leaves her after eight years of marriage and she learns the extent of his infidelity, a doctor links Anna’s reproductive problems to the chlamydia he had passed on to her without her knowledge.
So far, so Costello. Threads of A Beautiful Loan appeared previously in the story At the Gate, included in Barcelona, and in This Falling Sickness, in The China Factory. We are rooting for Anna when part two skips forward nearly five years and she gets involved with an Algerian software engineer named Karim, ignoring the I Ching’s counsel to retreat.
He introduces her to Islam, and she finds herself enchanted by its rites and rituals, which she practices in secret. (The book’s title comes from the Qur’an: “If you loan to Allah a beautiful loan, He will double it to your credit, and He will grant you forgiveness.”) Over time, however, we wince as Karim also becomes controlling, disallowing Anna’s beloved books and music and banishing her dog, Boo, to sleep outside in the cold.
“Men and women are not all that different – and joy and sorrow are universal,” Costello once told The Irish Times. A Beautiful Loan homes in on some sorrows particular to women, which feels timely in the wake of the Epstein files. Sex still fills Anna with shame on occasion, and the STI is “a secret [she] will keep for life”.
Despite her admiration of their work, Anna grapples with her favourite writers’ treatment of women. “Did Joyce, who visited prostitutes from the age of 14 and ridiculed them in Ulysses, give thought to the destitute women on the back streets of Dublin, many of whom were country girls lured into prostitution on arrival in the city?”
[ Author Mary Costello: ‘I want my characters to be rattled by something’Opens in new window ]
A Beautiful Loan is Anna’s attempt to understand what she refers to as the “climate of the psyche” – “those dimly perceived undercurrents that have agency over external actions and events”. Unfortunately, literary references, such as long tracts on the life and death of Camus, weigh down her self-reflection in the second half.
Unlike, say, the details of embalming that animated the story The Choc-Ice Woman, published in The New Yorker and included in Barcelona, the rituals of Islam feel pasted in. Karim, too, never quite comes to life, and, as such, his appeal to Anna remains a mystery. She concedes that she finds certain events in her adult life “baffling”. Despite lengthy exchanges with her Jungian therapist, we readers, alas, are left none the wiser.
