What can you do inside a short story? Of the many engagements with other writers in Mary Costello’s collection, one ambition appears to guide her particularly; that of the narrator in a Jorge Luis Borges story who glimpses the Aleph, the point in space that contains everything, in Costello’s rendering, “the tiny sphere that encloses the whole universe, that makes visible every point and every place and every act from every angle, and in every light”. In her second book of short stories – The China Factory appeared more than a decade ago, and there have been two impressive novels since – the Galway-born writer plays with the lights and angles to ingenious effect, constantly manipulating the surface tension. That all-seeing clarity is impossible does not make the attempt worthless.
Her characters – men and women, past and present, captured in the first person or by an unknown outside voice – are frequently in transit and frequently confined. They are trapped in an auditorium, or on the Eurostar, in cars or on trips with another person whose reality they cannot share. In My Little Pyromaniac, a story with touches of the uncanny, a woman finds herself living next door to a former lover, confronted by the life she might have had and compelled, eventually, to scale his garden fence to perform an act that hovers somewhere between rescue and sabotage. It is the idea that their proximity might be shrouded in silence – they never speak to or otherwise acknowledge one another – and still generate intense emotion and near violence that is powerful; a continuation of their relationship by unspoken and yet irresistible means.
