tea at the midland and other stories by david constantine

times literary supplement 21 DECEMBER 2012

David Constantine’s fourth collection of short stories is deeply unsettling; its subjects include incest, self-harm and suicide. The title story, “Tea at the Midland”, which won the 2010 BBC short story prize, features a couple conducting an affair who share a conversation about an Eric Gill frieze at the Midland Hotel: “Knowing what I know, the thought of him carving naked men and women makes me queasy. – And if there was a dog or little girl in there, you’d vomit?” An undercurrent of horror runs through many of the seemingly banal scenarios. In “An Island”, the narrator simply reflects, “I’ve often thought that no sane or happy person could bear my life for even an hour if suddenly translated into it”.

This bleakness is counter-balanced by the defiance of Constantine’s characters. Often, they express a desire to create their own narratives, no matter how great a detachment from reality this may involve. In “Alphonse”, a man breaks out of an old people’s home, changes his name and flees the country in order to pedal down the length of the Rhône, although he knows that he has barely six months to live. In “The House by the Weir and the Way”, a woman writes intimate letters on behalf of others, for a small fee. Her partner, not unreasonably, argues that this amounts to “playing God”. In “Asylum”, it is suggested that a young woman’s sanity may in fact be saved by her ability to write fiction.

Many of Constantine’s characters seem to have resigned themselves to their unfulfilled lives. In “Doubles”, however, one character is able to register a protest against this:

You do see very ugly things through the window when a train slides into and slides away out of a town, the backs, the things let go beyond repair, the slovenly mess, but even all that, I thought, you would fasten your eyes on it and wish not to let go, because nobody wants to be shut up dead while the world, good and bad continues without them when they are young.

As AS Byatt has said of an earlier collection of Constantine’s short stories, “Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be. Reading them is a series of short shocks of (agreeably envious) pleasure.”  This new collection shows him to be on equally sparkling form.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement