The China Factory

by Mary Costello

China Factory

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Ireland, Literary Fiction, Irish Literature, Book Club

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Mary Costello lives in Dublin. Her collection of short stories, The China Factory, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Academy Street is her first novel.

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twelve perfect short stories, and each one is a piece of art. I mean that literally, because I could see every one of them in my mind as though they were on a screen. Quiet little gems that contain entire lives in just a few pages.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perceptive stories that feature highly observant protagonists and shine a light on relationship connections and often the moment that breaks them, the cracks, the rupture, the inability to move on, the consequence of absorbing the knowledge without acting on it.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each story in this collection of a dozen is a gem. That is not common with volumes of short stories, with the exception, perhaps of Alice Munro. These stories exemplify what I look for in a short story. They can be glimpses of moments and they can convey the essence of an entire life or relationship. Many of these stories also illuminate life in Ireland in particular such as the title story 'The China Factory'. The final story 'The Sewing Room' set in Northern Ireland, captures an entire life as a woman prepares to go to her retirement party after decades as a teacher in the village school. I loved the description of her taking the Lough Swilly bus into Derry to visit the stationers/ art supply story monthly. A simple detail but so telling in revealing the simplicity of the pleasures this woman looks forward to. I wondered if that stationers indeed exists now. Many of the stories are accounts of lives lived with regrets such as 'And Who Will Pay Charon?'
This is a Stinging Fly Press book and I am pleased to see them doing well. Small publishers have stiff competition, and can be overlooked by large chain book sellers. This is a book for lovers of short stories, women writers, Irish fiction, Alice Munro, William Trevor and good writing.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academy Street is a near-perfect novella and I also enjoyed The River Capture, so I wanted to complete the set by reading Costello’s first book. Its dozen understated stories are about Irish men and women the course of whose lives are altered by chance meetings, surprise liaisons, or not-quite-affairs that needle them ever after with the could-have-been. The mood of gentle melancholy would suit a chilly moonlight drive along the coast road to Howth. In the opening title story, a teenage girl rides to her work sponging clay cups with an oddball named Gus. Others can’t get past things like his body odour, but when there’s a crisis at the factory she sees his calm authority save the day. Elsewhere, a gardener rushes his employer to the hospital, a woman attends her ex-husband’s funeral, and a school inspector becomes obsessed with one of the young teachers he observes.

Three favourites: In “And Who Will Pay Charon?” a man learns that, after he rejected Suzanne, she was hideously attacked in London. When she returns to the town as an old woman, he wonders what he might have done differently. “The Astral Plane” concerns a woman who strikes up a long-distance e-mail correspondence with a man from New York who picked up a book she left behind in a library. How will their intellectual affair translate into the corporeal world? The final story, “The Sewing Room,” reminded me most of Academy Street and could be a novel all of its own, as a schoolteacher and amateur fashion designer prepares for her retirement party and remembers the child she gave up for adoption.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Annemarie Neary · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her debut collection, Mary Costello has produced something more significant than most writers do in an entire career. Each superbly crafted story carries a novel’s worth of characterisation, insight and empathy. If you still consider the short story incapable of satisfying you, try these ones! In some respects, Costello is on well-trodden ground (for the Irish short story, at least) - emotional isolation, failure of communication, the death of hope. But this is a world where traditional Ireland is constantly rubbing up against modernity - an internet romance provides the engine for one story, an encounter with an undercover policewoman another. Throughout the book, contemporary cultural references (to books and music, in particular) run alongside deft observations of the rhythms of rural life. The sheer quality of Costello’s prose – lyrical but never pretentious – makes the work a joy to read, even as she deals with some harrowing subject-matter (the death of a child, a diagnosis of terminal illness). While the outside world is a lure it is also, in many cases, the locus of tragedy and loss – demonstrated most strikingly in one of her strongest stories, And Who Will Pay Charon? (a story with a killer opening line, incidentally, ‘I heard she was out’.) At the heart of the collection is the yearning of so many of these characters for a fuller realisation of their secret selves. Indeed, The Astral Plane and The Sewing Room (another favourite) seem to suggest that this is where love itself resides. First books of this quality are very, very rare. Highly recommended.

[W.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"No more dying." Frank O'Hara wrote that prescription in his "Ode to Joy." Mary Costello's The China Factory is a collection of short stories by an author who decided not to take his advice. This book consists of a dozen tales, and many of them are drenched in mortality the way baba au rhum is drenched in, well, rhum.

I found myself wanting to invoke a stereotype that Irish writers tend towards dourness. Well, there is James Joyce's Dubliners, and you tend to remember the way "The Dead" colors all the other stories in that collection. And Beckett, of course. It doesn't get much darker than Beckett's fetishization of absurdism. Yeats can be pretty dour when he's not levitating in love. You could go down an Irish checklist and say "dark heart, dark heart, dark heart." But then there are writers to disprove a sloppy generalization like that. Oscar Wilde. Well, the plays. Much of the poetry might bolster the argument. And then even the darker Irish writers have that black Irish humor that must be mother's milk in that soggy climate, that oppressive greyness. But there have been more recent Irish novelists whose bestsellers break the paradigm, maybe suggesting that much of the darkness was due to darker times when stifling provincialism and colonialism and poverty and Catholic repression played strong roles in coloring the literature.

Costello's collection is a gathering of dour stories. And they don't resort to black humor to offer the reader any comic relief. But because they are, for the most part, well-made stories, and because they have worthwhile things to say, you tend not to mind the bleakness. Or I tended not to mind.

Here is a brief breakdown of my impression of the stories (with synopses) following their order in the collection.

The title story sets the tone for the rest of the collection. A young woman "with a future" works briefly in a china factory near her home. She mixes with people who may not match her future station in life. But she wants to fit in, to "pass." She dissimulates. Carpooling with two older near-neighbors, a man and a woman, she comes to be invested emotionally in the life of the older man driving her to work each day. But only in a rather voyeuristic way. He is a loner in life and an outcast in the workplace, the china factory. A traumatizing event happens in the workplace. People are on the verge of being killed by a madman. The outcast saves many lives and receives no recognition for this. The young woman moves on to her next phase of life. Later, she learns of his lonely death. This inability to speak one's mind, one's soul, will afflict many characters in the stories which follow. It's probably the dominant theme of the collection: emotional paralysis.

I found the second story, "You Fill Up My Senses," to be one of my favorites in the book. A young girl narrates her family life. She lives on a farm with her mother, father, grandmother, and a younger sister and brother. The hardness of farm life is brought home and there is a magical sort of connection the young mother shares with her children, almost as if she were another, wiser sibling. This story felt almost like a description of farm life from centuries ago. But there would be occasional mentions of technology to indicate the tale takes place in our time. It was the rhythm of the prose matching the rhythms of farm life and chores which made it feel timeless and almost anachronistic, but in an interesting way. The child begins to feel a psychological break with her family with regard to their treatment of animals. The story is ultimately about the impending loss of the mother and the child's reckoning of this. So two divides open up at once. It was darkly beautiful and difficult to process because of the verisimilitude.

"Things I See" is another tale about emotional paralysis. A wife and mother to a young girl is in a relationship which has reached a difficult stretch. Her sister stay over for an extended period as a house guest. The sister is an accomplished cellist and a free spirit. The reader senses where this tale is going, or at least one part of that "going." The adultery is foreseeable. But Costello isn't really interested in surprising you with plot twists in any of these stories. She's much more interested here in crafting studies in (often excruciating) passivity. The tale marshals its energy to create taut prose which runs on the tension between extreme passivity and an extreme adulation of someone who is doing you wrong. The reader ends up feeling trapped inside that paralyzed body, which can only see and not react or speak out. I wonder if this tack might lead to some readers experiencing emotional claustrophobia themselves.

"The Patio Man" is about a random stranger, a gardener, suddenly being thrown into the midst of a woman's miscarriage. He is the one who must drive his employer (a virtual stranger) to the hospital when the tragic event occurs. I didn't feel this tale was as fleshed-out as the others, but it had a different feel which might have added to the gestalt of the collection.

"This Falling Sickness" is a doubly-dark tale in that it is about the problematic death of an ex (how does one grieve this) which is inextricably bound up with the memory of the loss of a child which the remarried protagonist once had with that ex. This is a tale where Costello really works well with the images which tell her tale. There are weird echoes and resonances with the theme of falling in this story. The death of her young son in an auto accident is indelibly scored on her mind as the image of him falling after the arc of his thrown body surrenders to the pull of gravity. Her ex dies by falling while mountain climbing. After her ex's funeral, a young epileptic with "the falling sickness" has a tragic episode by the grave. This tale might be accused of wallowing a bit, particularly in the final passages. But if one is going to "write death," this prose certainly does that well, It casts a definitive and opaque pall.

"Sleeping with a Stranger" is another tale about emotional paralysis. Here it is a tale of a middle-aged man seeking respite from a long marriage gone cold. Maybe it is surprising to find this tale being told so sympathetically. The man is smitten with a young teacher whose class he must audit. He finds her youthful idealism, her freshness, intoxicating. Nothing comes of his initial attempts to become familiar with her. Years later, he encounters her again, now married, perhaps jaded herself. Now she is receptive to him. No affair comes of the man's ministrations and attention, but instead a rather unsatisfying fling in a hotel room. The man is also tending to his mother in a nursing home as she is nearing death. The man's distance from his mother (who has dementia) seems just another echo of his distance from the other women with whom he has attempted to bond. The tale ends with the mother's death and on a weirdly optimistic note that doesn't really seem borne out by the preceding events.

"And Who Will Pay Charon?" is again a tale of emotional paralysis. A man might have pursued love, a shared life, with a woman who gave him a gentle ultimatum before leaving the country. But he declined her offer. She went off to work as a nurse in London. He became a bachelor academic and grew to old age in solitude. It seemed mostly to agree with him. Years later, she returns to Ireland and he sees her about now and again. She seems disturbed, wild. Late in life, after the death of his old flame, he learns she was raped by monstrous sadists in England. He cannot process this. He sneaks into her home after her death and studies her belongings. The tale ends with this impossible new knowledge weighing the previously well-adjusted man down. The man questions whether he could have turned fate as one turns a river, if he had accepted her offer all those years ago.

"The Astral Plane" is actually the ethereal world of online romance in this tale about a woman falling in love with a complete stranger through the vagaries of chanc. A man finds a woman's copy of a book accidentally left behind after an author's reading. She had written her email in the back of the book. I didn't find this tale to be rewarding at all. There was the usual emotional paralysis of the central character but the level of the writing wasn't quite up to Costello's other tales. The tale didn't find a satisfying ending for me, and really nothing of substance happened. It's okay if nothing of substance happens, as long as the writing is beautiful, right? But I didn't find anything like that here.

"Little Disturbances" is another mortal tale in which a family man with grown children and a somewhat patient wife finds that even with all the characters in place to grieve you, death can still be a damn lonely road to walk. This is a tale of a prodigal daughter, although actually that metaphor might not be so apt. Rather, one of the daughters was driven away by the father's sternness and pride, many years ago. The tale ends with a hope for reconciliation but with darkness still percolating through everything. (Proofer's note: this tale has "Jimmy Stewart" as "Jimmy Stuart" on page 129, but I'm guessing that's a U.K. spell-check program that did that. Damn Royals!)

"Room in her Head" is about a woman sharing what should be jovial time with her spouse and another couple and feeling completely isolated from the group. I kept waiting for somebody to almost unconsciously (with no real mens rea) kill someone else, because the emotional paralysis and passive aggressive loathing was so overwhelming. I felt like this was a decent study in depression but little more.

"Insomniac" had a nice hook to it. You think here is another tale about another person under emotional duress who cannot get relief. This time it's insomnia. But this tale takes a weird turn. The insomniac goes out into the night and encounters a police woman who takes him on a wild ride. Nothing sexual happens, as one might expect. But when the man returns home, his wife is horrified. This story points a direction I hope the author might go in the future, allowing characters to do things we might not expect them to do.

"The Sewing Room" is a very well-turned short story. A woman who gave up a child for adoption when young ends up alone and childless in old age. She becomes a school teacher and ends up educating the children of the man who fathered her own reluctantly relinquished boy. The story takes place on the day when the teacher is being feted upon her retirement. She encounters the man again on this very day, as well as his wife and children. This could be a maudlin tale, but it is not told in that way. There is a cold clarity to everything. A sense of balance. But there is still the pinch of cruelty in the words and the fate.

Some samples of Costello's prose:

"Her mother's home was called Easterfield. She remembers it from when she was very small, a big house with tall windows and a wide lawn facing the wrong way--facing out to the fields instead of to the road--and a gravel yard with barns where her father parked the car. And upstairs long landings with creaking floorboards and rooms with no light bulbs, and the creepy backstairs at the far end. She has a faint memory of her mother's father with snow-white hair and round glasses sitting by the range holding a red plastic back scratcher in his hand. The house is all closed up now. On the day of her mother's fourth birthday a blackbird flew into the dining room and tore a piece of wallpaper from a spot above the window. The wallpaper had swirling ivy and serpents, and was very old. She sees her four-year-old mother standing in the room looking up at the blackbird. Suddenly her thoughts turn dark. She is getting too close to the sadness of her mother's life."

--from "You Fill Up My Senses."

"Then it was over and he was lying in his white vest and open trousers on top of her. He pulled away but his face had darkened. After he had put on his shirt he looked down and saw that he had buttoned it wrong and a look of unbearable sadness came on him. They did not say anything and he went back to his fishing and she to her book, and she was filled with terror and shame at what had just happened. But then later, as they were leaving, he said, 'I'm going to get you a pup, for next summer,' and he took away some of her shame. She would have liked him to hold her hand or kiss her hair, or something, before they went back down the mountain."

--from "The Sewing Room."

"The sickness had been inside him for months. In early spring he walked through the land, going deeper into the fields to the last hill. He moved up the slope and stood on the summit and was caught suddenly by the ground shifting. He began to list as if on a ship. He turned his head and saw the dark mouths of foxes' dens along the ditch. Once, when he was baling hay late on a summer's evening, he saw a vixen approach her den. A clutch of young cubs peeped out, anxious, and at the sight of the mother, came scrambling over each other, not orphaned at all. He imagined them all moving underneath him now, loosening the earth, tumbling through dark tunnels--a teeming world of foxes inside the hill. In winter they'd sleep, curled in a tight circle. The hill began to pitch that day and the sky spun. The bile rose up and he retched onto the summit. He longed for the cover of trees then, to stand under the beech tree and feel rain falling on the leaves."

--from "Little Disturbances."

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

another great irish short story writer, apparently.

correct, another great Irish short storywriter. I am being a little generous with the stars here, as one or two stories may be a little under 5, but I did engage fully with this book, just my thing. Often about the usual - unwanted pregnancy, retirement, infidelity, an email romance that is 'spoiled' by becoming 'real life', a shy man who steps forward in a difficult situation causing re-appraisal - it's the mature, steady way the stories are handled that impresses and gets under your skin. This approach makes the lyrical passages soar more, and the uncertainty, longing, dreams hit home. The day-to-day, flies, skies, cats and dishes, are unfussily, beautifully described, and often lead to wider considerations (e.g. a dead fly: its legs in the air, its thin wafery wings lying flat. The heat of the sun will dry its body outright. He thought he could smell its deadness, and the smell of warm dust that never leaves that room. Some nights he thinks it's his own dust that he smells, that specks of him rest on the shelves and the windowsill and on the spines of books.)

A wonderful debut collection, looking forward to her next.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely language in these lyrical stories describing love, hurt, regret, and more--the stuff of life. Beautifully mature collection of stories.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 Extra - Debut
Niamh Cusack reads this sharply observed story about a marriage in crisis from Mary Costello's acclaimed debut collection

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this on the strength of Acadamy
Street - and there were stories that were up to that dizzy height.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Katedurie50 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously good stories, full of the lyricism and pain of much Irish writing. They are particularly good at locating the sudden irruption of drama, or the weight of realisation which Joyce would have called an epiphany, in the humdrum and everyday. Nothing feels stretched or sensationalised, but here are birth, death, sex - mostly illicit -, betrayal, regret, loss. It's a hard thing to do but Costello never puts a foot wrong, as the inconsequential and the crucial are woven together.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The China Factory is a collection of twelve short stories, the first collection by Irish author, Mary Costello. Costello’s superbly crafted stories are about a range of ordinary people: a retiring teacher, a young woman just finished school, an elderly man facing the end of his life, a young landscape gardener, a ten-year-old girl, a young mother, a middle-aged schools inspector, a bitter bachelor, an insomniac husband, a suspicious wife. Her stories involve every day events, but also life-changing moments: a funeral, a retirement, rape, estrangement, childhood discovery, adultery, miscarriage, insanity, cruelty and death. Costello, with a minimum of words, deftly evokes a myriad of profound emotions on the darker side of human existence: despair and desperation, dissatisfaction, fear, grief, shame, guilt, regret, sinking hope and, overwhelmingly, loneliness. Her prose is often beautiful and evocative: “She knew then, it was easier to be the one hurt, than the hurter.” “…and as the night came down and the rain fell on the city it came to her that what this was – this man, this moment – what this was, most of all, was the resurrection of hope.” “That what the poets had once granted her- those brief encounters with the sublime – a child might too.” The reader could be forgiven for wondering if there are autobiographical elements to some of the stories. The stories have a very Irish feel yet will resonate universally with readers. Powerful and stirring.

[Vivian Valvano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I continue to be blown away by the talent of Irish author Mary Costello. Taken together, these stories comprise a series of studies in loneliness, loss, memory, regret, solitude, and meditation. All are good; several are gems. Protagonists are both male and female, and Costello is adept at penetrating the consciousnesses of both genders. One tale is the original attempt at what eventually became the superb novel "Academy Street." It is fascinating to see how a very good story evolved into a great novel.

[Emma Kantor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Costello tackles big themes—sickness, death, betrayal, and infidelity—with an economy of words. I still find myself coming back to certain images: a blood stain on the back of a mother’s nightdress; a lame pigeon; a wife washing potatoes in her kitchen after a rendezvous with a lover. I'm also fascinated by the recurring paradox of intimate strangers and estranged lovers.

[Ted Farrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never been a great fan of the short story, but the stories in this book are very good. The writing is beautiful. The characters come across as real people. My problem with the collection is that all the stories are incredibly sad. The principal characters are unhappy people, people who for the most part, have fallen out of love. The cumulative result is pretty depressing.

[Ashley Judge · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite was "Who will pay Charon" and the Sewing room.
This is a collection of 12 short stories by an Irish writer, all stories set in Ireland. Very sad stories that stay with you after you've closed the book. Lyrical and thought provoking. I will leave this book on my nightstand and read one or two stories now and then.

[Niamh Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gripping collection of stories, each one a gem in its own right. Every word feels carefully chosen and is perfectly placed. I've lived a dozen lives while exploring these vivid tales in the past month and I've no doubt I will re-read this powerful, emotionally charged, inspiring anthology again and again.

[Jen Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This debut collection of 12 short stories is as powerful as a dozen great novels - I wrote about my experience of reading it on my blog here
http://jen-squire.blogspot.com.au/201...

[Cyndie Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Filled with this sense of inescapable melancholy that is expressed beautifully - the way a funeral air can be heartbreaking and moving at the same time.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely book of short stories, subtle emotions playing throughout all the characters. Warm and intimate and melancholic might be the best description for this collection by an Irish writer.

[Anne Coll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing although all stories had so much sadness.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although aspects of the stories are well written, it just didn't engage me. The stories work in a bit of a gothic way, more emotional than rational. I didn't get some of the connections and would need to reread to understand the links between images, dreams and events. The stories are mostly about sadness and disconnection, with a very isolated and lonely narrator. Each ends with sentences that are clearly meant to express something powerful, but they didn't resonate with me.
They manage to feel quite long for short stories and do include a great deal about experiences and characters, but seemed to me a bit like exercises rather than from the heart.

[KLK]

Mary Costello's short story collection, THE CHINA FACTORY (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, ACADEMY STREET (2014), won the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year Award and was named overall Irish Book of the Year in 2014. It was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize, and the EU Prize for Literature, among others, and has been translated into several languages. Her critically acclaimed second novel, THE RIVER CAPTURE (2019), was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards, The Dalkey Novel Prize and the Kerry Novel of the Year Prize.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very Irish and very sad collection of short fiction manages to avoid turning maudlin but rather achieves graphically realistic depictions of toxic sensitivity and perfect moments of existential despair. Not for everybody, but an accomplishment for just those reasons. Sometimes, you wish there were some moments of black humor to balance out the oppressive bleakness. One story about an abandoned romance and a shocking violent chain of events near the end is enough to make Rainer Werner Fasssbinder film seem hopeful. But Costello captures loneliness like a pro, without any melodrama or violins.

[Abigail Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is technically a reread, but I didn't post a review when I initially read it, so I'll write one now.

Note-perfect collection of short stories. Costello does what I like so much in a writer: creates beautiful prose out of the original language of close observation. All of these stories are memorable and a few--the title story, "And Who Will Pay Charon?", "The Sewing Room"--are absolutely arresting. Costello's voice inhabits a variety of characters naturally and empathetically and explores wide emotional territory fearlessly. Love this book, can't wait for a new one from her.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book has such beautifully written prose. while all the stories felt similar, they differed and showed so many aspects of everyday life through different characters. I also really liked the approach to Irish culture throughout-- it felt very atmospheric, both lonely and ancient. a lot of the stories defy time and place somewhat which was really interesting, though this doesn't mean they're kind of speculative fiction/supernatural stuff; I think this shows the power of the mundane to transcend time.

[Tedfawcett]

This was a superb collection of short stories but with a constant themes of loss, betrayal, guilt, sadness, lost opportunities and hopeless yearning. It did lack humour or intrigue but is well worth the reading. My favourite was the haunting tale of " The Sewing Room " and the first one " The China Factory ". Costello`s " Acadamy Street " was one of the best novels I have ever read and this little collection is another great success.

Well done to the author.

[Sheila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of 12 short stories was delightful, covering topics such as unfulfilled lives, loves, loss ,disappointment ,all with a huge eye or detail and told in such a way that makes readers feel they know the character. It is a sad reflection on life really but so well told it makes compelling reading.

[Pamela Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

well written, enjoyable