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In each of her previous novels and story collections, the Irish author Mary Costello has revealed the inner vastness hidden within even the quietest lives. Her latest book, A Beautiful Loan, goes further, with a faithful, poetic exploration of the multitudes we contain and what it means to be human.
From the outset, in the novel’s prologue, Anna tells us she is determined to account for herself and her life. But we are to expect no ordinary narrative, concerned only with “actual events”, “evidence-based” or relying on “historical data”. No, Anna is interested in the “climate of the psyche” and “the vibrations of the soul”. Can it be that the very things we cannot quantify or rationalise are what make life meaningful?
When she meets Peter, the older, worldly man whom she will marry, Anna tells us she wants to know everything about him – every part of his existence. Only Peter is distant and evasive. He has no wish to spend time with her family and sees no need to compromise his own wants. There is a sense over the years that Anna has some understanding of what is wrong here, but almost at once she denies this knowledge, just as he denies answers to her questions.
Later, when Anna frees herself from Peter, she falls for Karim. He is a Muslim – although not a devout one – kind, generous and boyish. She also finds solace in his faith. However, a tragedy leads him to become increasingly dogmatic, lacking in compassion.
Beneath the pin-sharp topography of an emotional life, this is a novel of ideas. We are asked what it might mean to know another person, and whether such a thing is even possible. Childhood is depicted as perhaps the only time of ever being “fully known”, so its loss feels elemental, with adulthood an ever-growing estrangement from others.
Elsewhere, Peter’s cruelty and emotional disconnect is couched in the language of science and reason, challenging its limited means of describing our lives. When Anna miscarries, he says: “Look, I know you’re upset about this … but remember it was just a bundle of cells.” Facts – scientific facts – do not give a true or full account of meaning. These cells both symbolise and are more than that.
It is of a piece with the way Costello’s previous fiction has explored animal rights that Anna’s growing awareness is inspired not by a human but by her dog, Boo. “She has altered me, generated in me a new awareness of animal consciousness, of their moment-by-moment existence.” It is just this kind of attentive presence that brings joy to Anna’s life: chopping vegetables “with slow, deliberate awareness, as if I might hurt them”, or “I turn on the tap and when the water flows, it is miraculous”. The necessity of co-feeling she describes feels like a moral insistence on compassion, what she terms a “suffering-with” each and every thing.
At the same time, this animal consciousness seems to account for Anna’s ability to intuit or dream things that prefigure knowledge. Her body repeatedly apprehends things of which she is only dimly aware. Yet when her husband dismisses this as imagination or childishness, we recognise Anna’s – and our – dilemma in accounting for truth when it defies convention.
How, then, are we to account for things that lie outside ordinary language? One answer is through the power of art, of metaphor. The novel sings with vivid experiences of music, literature, film. Yet art is no panacea – this isn’t that banal defence of literature as a schooling in empathy.
“I see the wounded everywhere,” Anna tells us. “Injured trees … broken statues.” We come to see Peter and Karim as wounded also, and that it is Anna’s experience of love, longing and loss that enables her to notice this. To see the suffering of others, we must experience suffering in turn. Costello returns again and again to this cycle of pain suffered and pain meted out. She has spoken of her admiration of Albert Camus, and he and his work are a palpable presence. However, the figure I had in mind throughout was Simone Weil, the philosopher and mystic Camus heralded as “the only great spirit of our time”. For Weil claims “suffering-with” is our moral duty.
Many authors describe the writer’s principal duty as one of attention: to the world around us, in all its beauty and ugliness. In a sense, this is also a moral act. Costello does this in all her work. That we as readers might be surprised by the significance and profundity she renders to each and every life is a measure of her depth of attention, and perhaps why there is no greater chronicler of the inner life at this moment. As artificial intelligence and big tech force an increasingly diminished definition upon us of what it means to be human, this novel reminds us that we are so much more.
