Review of David Constantine’s The Shieling, by Andrew Hurley.
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Coming across David Constantine’s debut collection of short stories, Under The Dam, a few years ago was one of those happy accidents that occur from time to time, when you discover a writer who you just get. The landscapes are places that you’ve been, places you know; the ways of seeing the world seem to resonate in a deeply significant way.
Reading Constantine’s latest collection, The Shieling, I was struck with the same feeling, particularly because the first story is set in Manchester.
Beginning, establishes the tone and style for the whole book – a bleeding together of real worlds and imaginary spaces, of life and death, all of which is rendered with the lightest of touches. Constantine is proficient, like all good writers of short fiction, at gesturing towards much bigger stories with such skill that we can imagine them as if they had been told to us in full. Indeed what is hinted at in one story is often indirectly revisited in another – the deteriorating elderly mother in Beginning might be the one fleshed out in Phantom Pain. So there is a sense of this actually being a collection, with feelings and characters moving fluidly throughout. The walls between the stories are as nominal and fragile as the walls of reality and truth within them.
In Beginning, the narrator recalls a particular incident in 1961 where he saw his “first dead fellow human being” being hauled out of the Irwell – which for Constantine is a Mancunian Styx, separating life and death, Manchester and Salford. Yet, intertwined with this strangely compelling horror is the recollection of many other things which seem in the story (and I’m still not sure how he does this) to exist at the same moment, giving the story a strange sense of weightlessness: the local eccentric who used to direct the buses going over Victoria Bridge, his grandparents, the First War, the Second War, private history, national history.
There is love in the story – the narrator recalls a brief infatuation with a girl on the bus he knew only by her first name, M, as well as considering the romance of his parents’ wartime courtship – but it seems only a temporary fix for a loneliness that is inevitable and ultimately destructive.
In fact, many of the stories are about how such loneliness is perceived from the outside. In the first story, the dead body soaked and swinging as it is winched from the water suggests many things to the narrator – “Abattoir, martyrdom, circus, theatre, ascension” – and in The Man Who Said He Had Died, in which Edward claims to have died and come back to life while out jogging in the park, death becomes a metaphor for the distance between people, even those – perhaps especially those – who claim to know each other well. It’s really a story about the inability to communicate the most profound of feelings. Edward’s wife, Pauline, thinks of the cut price trips Edward’s career in railways has afforded them – to “Thurso or Vilnius or Kalamata”, and the round the world adventure via Siberia and LA – with an equal measure of happiness and regret as she was unable to accompany him on his most important journey. The source of her anger and her frustration is that she cannot comprehend death as a place where
“there was neither a floor nor a ceiling, no ground, no sky…no light or dark.”
There is a feeling from the reading the stories that happiness or truth are to be found only in imaginary places, or places hidden away from and therefore untainted by the world.
The shieling of the title story is one such place – a haven of peace as precisely structured as Yeats’ Isle of Innisfree:
“In the shieling, she said, we had only the necessary things: a bed, a table, two chairs…even books we had very few, nine at the most that was the rule.”
Yet, even these private spaces are subject to change. Even the most remote are not completely out of the reach of reality and time.
The imaginary world of the anonymous female character in The Shieling, is quickly and easily dismantled. The idyllic English village of Penton Mewsey in Purgatory attracts the attention of the Devil. And in Witness, a strange and beautiful terraced hole in a German forest – an industrial relic from the War – becomes a symbol of the past, which the main character imagines will be completely altered by time, filled with water and its depths unknowable:
“When it is full, we will come again, we’ll find a rowing boat, we’ll row out to where the house was in the forest in the upper air.”
One of the most compelling things about these stories is the sense of the unreal, whether it be in the way characters speak, which is sometimes in a timeless and yet oddly dated register, or in Constantine’s poetics. There is something slightly unnatural and therefore slightly unsettling in these worlds. They are sharply drawn, for sure, but all have a feeling of chaos. Time is a maelstrom and all we can do is try to find a place of calm in which to make sense of it all.
Highly recommended.
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Andrew Michael Hurley is the author of The Unusual Death of Julie Christie and Other Stories and his website is at www.amhurley.com
David Constantine is the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2010 and you can read more about David here.