Crookedwood an ‘amalgam’ of small midland towns, says author

Author and poet Liza Costello lives in Westmeath. Her second novel Crookedwood, just published, is a psychological thriller set in the Irish midlands. Her work has been shortlisted for the RTÉ Radio 1 Short Story award, the Seán Ó’ Faoláin International Short Story Competition, the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Short Story Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. Her writing has been broadcast on RTÉ1 and published in most of the major literary journals here and in the UK. She kindly took time out for this exclusive interview.

Q: Firstly, please tell us about your connection with Westmeath.

Liza Costello: I grew up in Moate, moved away after school, and then returned in 2019 to live here with my family, in the house in which I grew up. My daughter attends the same primary school I went to, and my son will go to the boys’ school where my mother taught. So, I suppose I’m about as born and bred Westmeath as it’s possible to be.

Q: You’ve said that Crookedwood is an ‘amalgam’ of small midland towns, rather than the village near Mullingar. Many such towns were blighted by ghost estates and other Celtic Tiger scars. Have they recovered?

LC: I think most of them really have recovered, beyond the odd physical trace. But not all towns were lifted by the Celtic Tiger boat and, in a doubly unfair paradoxic, some towns seem to bear the worst scar tissue of the recession – disused cinemas, abandoned business parks. That’s about a pre-existing unevenness in terms of prosperity versus deprivation in rural Ireland and partly concerns factors like location and luck – towns near the motorway for instance have a clear advantage.

Q: Both your novels, The Estate and Crookedwood, are set in the madness of the late Tiger phase. Why did you choose to set the second novel in the same time frame as the first?

LC: Looking back, the Celtic Tiger seems to me a time of upheaval and great carelessness, when greed (among other things) had people do destructive things, showing no consideration of future consequences. A kind of madness, as you put it. That is interesting territory for fiction writing! I really like the American writer Attica Locke, whose crime novels are strongly rooted in place and the past on which they rest. She said once that the crimes in her novels rest on a previous crime, which again rests on another crime, going back decades. I find this inspiring as a writer of crime/noir. The Celtic Tiger didn’t come from nowhere; though the recession was global, our version reflects our own particular history.

Q: Isolation is common to both novels. Beth is alone in a ghost estate in your first novel, while in the second, Sarah’s isolation within her hometown is brilliantly depicted. We hear of lonely bachelor farmers, but not so much about lonely rural women. How did Sarah’s ‘alone in a crowd’ status come to you, and do you think as the saying goes ‘you can never go home again’?

LC: That’s an interesting observation. I can’t say I think you can never go home again, seeing as that’s exactly what I did myself! But the Moate of my adulthood is a different place to the Moate of my childhood. So maybe I haven’t exactly gone home again. Once a person changes in the inevitably fundamental way we change as we go from child to adult – and that’s happening to Sarah as she’s starting to grow away from home – the home of one’s childhood moves out of reach. Frank O’Connor famously observed that the short story involves an intense awareness of human loneliness. I think there’s an inherent loneliness in the novel form too. Because fiction is about the human condition and loneliness is inescapably part of that.

Q: There’s an atmosphere of smalltown meanness in Crookedwood that the reader can’t miss. Do you think this is especially Irish or is it universal?

LC: I think this is definitely universal. I just think living in a small community seems to naturally impose a kind of obligatory conformism. I also think it’s true that the decency of some of Crookedwood’s characters – Nancy (at times!), Joe, Olive, even Bill – is equally universal.

The writer Dermot Healy, also from Westmeath, depicted rural Ireland in his last novel Long Time No See not as a small community, typical in Irish fiction, but as a ‘collectivity’ – a loose assortment of characters, some local some not, and I love this vision. A ‘collectivity’ is so much more comfortable than the potentially limiting idea of ‘small community’.

Q: Heavy drinking is something that features in both of your novels. Do you think loneliness in remote places can literally drive people to drink?

LC: The late Mark Lanagan, who was open about his drinking problem, wrote in his memoir about preferring a ‘muted reality’. Loneliness I think can give life a painfully heightened feeling, in which case alcohol can serve as a kind of numbing agent. It stands to reason that in certain circumstances people would turn to alcohol as a crutch.

Q: You’ve chosen noir as a genre rather than strictly crime. In Crookedwood the local guard is actually complicit in a heinous crime. Do you find you have more room for character development in noir?

LC: Thanks for noticing this, it’s an important distinction, I think. Definitely there is more room for character development in noir, which for me is all about creating a feeling of low-key dread that slowly escalates. Within that, there are fewer external plot demands – you don’t feel obliged as a writer to make sure every now and then a guy walks in with a gun, as Raymond Chandler put it!

Q: Without any spoilers, there’s one murder in Crookedwood that involves a cowshed! It’s ingenious, although also very sad. Where did you get the idea?

LC: I didn’t grow up on a farm (both my parents were teachers) but our neighbours were farmers. One family had a slurry pit and we were forbidden from going near it. It was an open pit – a dark vast thing. I suppose that memory emerged in Crookedwood. I don’t plot my novels before writing them, but I do find that old fears can sometimes bubble up into the narrative.

Q: Agatha Christie was interested in the darkness behind the façade of the quiet English village. You have mined a similar seam in your novels. Can you talk a little about that?

LC: That’s a great compliment, to be compared to Christie. I think there’s darkness everywhere, and I suppose having grown up in rural Ireland, I perhaps have a better grasp of how it manifests there and that’s what I therefore gravitate towards.

Q: I liked Sarah’s mother Nancy a lot. Feisty yet fearful and suddenly rejecting her Catholic faith in late middle age. Do you think this is true of a lot of Irish women?

LC: I’m glad you liked Nancy. I imagine she’s not alone. I’m agnostic myself, and like many in this country now have deep reservations about the Catholic Church. For Nancy to just abandon it all like that, I think would take courage and strength, and a not insignificant amount of anger.

Q: You’ve moved from literary fiction in your short stories to genre fiction in your novels. Why is that? And do you think there’s an air of superiority among Irish writers in particular around literary fiction vs everything else?

LC: My reading tends towards the literary, and always has done, though I gravitate towards writers like Graham Greene, Louise Doughty and Attica Locke, to name but a few. Genre fiction reaches a wider readership although I’m not sure to what extent in Ireland, where literary work does well. There is definitely a sense of superiority around literary versus genre. And to a degree, I understand it – the quality of genre writing does vary a lot. But I think you can only judge each work of fiction on its own merit.

Q: Do you think your literary work has served you well when in genre writing?

LC: Definitely, but my literary reading also helps me as a writer. I don’t put on a different hat when I go to write a suspense novel.

Q: Your protagonists in both novels are flawed women and both fall for shady men. But they find extraordinary strength when it’s needed. Do you think that’s something we all possess?

LC: I really do. I think the human capacity to survive trauma and suffering is incredible. It’s remarkable and moving I think, to see the strength people can find inside themselves and I love fiction that meaningfully engages with this theme – the TV series Patrick Melrose is a brilliant example, one of many.

Q: Could you describe a typical writing day for the readers?

LC: I have two small children so a typical day for me often doesn’t involve writing, unless I get up early! There is something lovely about getting up when it’s still dark and experiencing the light come up as you work. But I couldn’t do that forever. And then there’s the odd spell where my other work (copyediting) is quiet, and I can write while the kids are at school.

Q: Finally, can you let us know if there’s something else in the pipeline?

LC: I have a couple of stories brewing and one feels like a Gothic story set (I think) in a spooky house in Connemara. But these days I’m back at the poems for a bit.