Constantine’s bleak, beautiful visions of life

EVERY artistic medium — and indeed every genre within a medium, every form — has its own particular and peculiar nature that allows it to express some things better than others.

We don’t expect a poem to be able to represent the nature of conflict between characters with the same range and scope as a work of drama, say, any more than we expect a novel to provide us with the same satisfactions as a sonnet.

David Constantine is one of very few contemporary writers to have been able to take all sorts of routes and paths and detours and to have produced a coherent body of work over many years in a number of genres and forms.

You may have read his poetry: his most recent collection, “Elder” (2014), was published to mark his 70th birthday. You may have read his novel, “The Life-Writer” (2015). You may have read some of his many translations — of Brecht, Goethe, Kleist. Most likely, you may have seen the film based on his short story, “In Another Country”, retitled “45 Years” and starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling.

What do they all have in common, these many effusions and activities? What makes them Constantinian? They are all careful, subtle, intelligent works — serious, unshowy, often surprisingly moving. Fans will be delighted to discover that Constantine’s fifth collection of short stories, “The Dressing-Up Box” (2019), continues in the same mode.

The big difference in this book is that many of the stories concern children — and in particular children under threat from themselves, from other children and from adults.

“When I Was a Child”, the longest story and undoubtedly the best, is a portrait of life in an orphanage, the House of the Brothers and Sisters of Mercy, somewhere in England, not long ago. Constantine’s orphanage is a place almost entirely without mercy, as through hints and suggestions, he gradually builds towards revealing the appalling violence at its heart. Hope comes in the form of a defiant young girl named Jezebel, who rallies the children with tales of a boy called Billy, who has managed to escape the orphanage’s regime: his example becomes an inspiration to the other children.

He rode by night and he hid by day and the men in black looking this way and that could not find him. Five nights he rode, five days he hid, and came at last all in one piece and in good spirits into the city where no one knew him from Adam and he was safe.

Dreams of safety — and threats to safety — are everywhere in these stories. In the book’s title story, a group of children find themselves in “The Big Safe House”, sometime after some unspecified terrible thing has happened.

The landlines are dead; TV broadcasts have ceased; there are enforcers roaming the country looking to enforce goodness knows what.

Hidden away in their country retreat, the children put on weird masques and entertainments for each other and wait to leave for the west in a red-andwhite school bus. Is it an allegory? Possibly. Simple, memorable, weird, unsettling? Definitely. ◆ Read the full review on www.herald.co.zw