Sometimes a book generates immediate enthusiasm. As a regular reviewer, I notice there are occasions I’ll get that feeling of excitement around thirty pages in. I find myself quickly circling artful turns of phrase in red ink, scribbling thematic observations in the margins, even setting the galleys down and saying aloud words like “Whoa.” A comparatively subdued read, Richard Cumyn’s novella Constance, Across is not one of those books.
Short but structurally complex, this book is a more subtle pleasure, one that benefits from more than one reading. A Canlit veteran, Cumyn is the author of a prior novella, The View from Tamischeira, (Dundurn Press) and five short-fiction collections, most recently The Young in Their Country and Other Stories (Enfield & Wizenty, 2010). This latest work features a consistently understated narrative voice, despite a storyline that involves a complete upending of the circumstances of his eponymous protagonist, the middle-aged Ottawa school teacher Constance Hardy.
The reader is slowly but confidently drawn through a complicated storyline that commences in medias res, with Constance beginning a confession in the locale where the plot eventually concludes—far from the wintery climes of our nation’s capital, in the blistering heat of her recently adopted home of Lahore, Pakistan. In a rooftop restaurant in that Punjabi metropolis, she sits across from Grant Lungren, who has travelled nearly 11,000 kilometres to confront her about the role he believes she played in his son James taking his own life. Constance abandoned Ottawa—and her job and husband and two children—days after an embarrassing public confrontation with James, who was her student, in front of the rest of her class, about the comparatively minor sin of having neglected his homework.
The incident and its mortal aftermath provide a overdue jolt to Constance’s own otherwise stagnant existence—workaday drudgery, an absent husband, and poor relations with her sons, one of whom has set up a hermitage in the basement. Constance explains her side of the filial suicide story to James’s jet-lagged dad, in the process revealing how and why she accompanied fellow pedagogue Afzal Khan, a man she barely knew, all the way to Pakistan. Despite her profound shift in habitat and surrounding cultural mores, Constance leaves the impression of someone whose personality will never change—until a twist ending suggests a serious realignment of her perspective and priorities.
Cumyn tells Constance’s tale in a sober narrative style, lending the prose an almost quotidian tone nearly throughout. For instance, here Constance is thinking of her lover Afzal while preparing dinner for her generally absent businessman husband, Tom:
I put on a CD of cello music, poured a glass of red wine and began to chop. Our old collie stayed close, leaning into my leg as I stood at the counter. Afzal never thought much of dogs. He refused to believe we actually let one live in the house with us. I glanced at the clock. Thom would be pulling into the driveway soon.
The voice and mood created are realistic, if somewhat devoid of dynamism. There are, however, occasional poetic flashes, as in the moment when Constance reflects on the experience of seeing Afzal upon his release from a Lahori prison:
The sight of him, how it flensed by soft tissue, tore muscle from bone, artery from organ. They hadn’t removed his fingers or a hand, as he feared they might. Was amputation preferable to the pain he’d been made to suffer? Sometimes I wonder. Two guards dragged him supported between them out the rear door of that hellish jail and dumped him in the street.
Alternating between Constance’s present-tense direct address of Grant in Pakistan and flashback sequences representing her explanations to him, Constance, Across requires an attentive audience of the sort accustomed to parsing the clues of the murder-mystery crime genre. A significant volume of information—about Constance, her new lover Afzal, a sex worker named Malika who is Afzal’s mother, Afzal’s extradition from Canada and subsequent arrest in Pakistan—is outlined in the novella’s first dozen pages.
The barrage of information can feel disorienting at times, requiring close concentration as the narrative toggles between the events in Canada and those in Pakistan. Near the end of the book, everything hinted at in the opening pages has been explicated. On second reading, all makes perfect sense and additional nuance is experienced more overtly. Whether the first reading confuses or compels may, on some levels, be a question whose answer varies from reader to reader.
Despite such a dramatic shift in mise-en-scène, this novella is uncompromisingly focused on character rather than setting. Ottawa may be cold and Lahore may be hot, but the one constant is Constance—the reader is kept closest to her inner emotional landscape and, given the intrinsic mediation of the flashback technique, at somewhat of a distance from the unfolding events.
Ever a world-weary cynic, Constance finds herself as constrained by South Asian social strictures as she was by the stifling politesse of North American educational conventions. But she’s also a sensitive soul who connects with her colleague Afzal after they witness a traumatic car accident on the bus ride to school in Canada, and throws all of herself into efforts to rescue him from a mysterious prison sentence in Pakistan. She does this despite her growing sense of alienation from the man, one that mirrors her discontent with her husband and nuclear family in the Canada she to which she vows never to return, even as Pakistan continues to bewilder her daily.
An unexpected turn of events occurs on the book’s final page, in the form of a dramatic action taken by Constance herself. When assessing a twist ending, I often ask: not only is this a surprise but, given everything that’s led up to it, is it the only authentic and appropriate conclusion for the book? I’m not fully convinced. What happens can either be read as the ultimate demonstration of how much Constance has transformed through her intercontinental journey—or, paradoxically, of how little. Could the book have done without this somewhat sensational turn, or even have been stronger without it?
I continue to ponder these possibilities, and it’s a satisfying, rather than frustrating, sensation. Perhaps it’s a credit to Cumyn as an author that rather than relying on linguistic pyrotechnics or providing overt answers, he slyly endows the reader with many questions, ones that persist weeks after putting the book down.
Quattro Books | 104 pages | $16.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1926802596
‘Constance, Across’ by Richard Cumyn
Book Reviews
Sometimes a book generates immediate enthusiasm. As a regular reviewer, I notice there are occasions I’ll get that feeling of excitement around thirty pages in. I find myself quickly circling artful turns of phrase in red ink, scribbling thematic observations in the margins, even setting the galleys down and saying aloud words like “Whoa.” A comparatively subdued read, Richard Cumyn’s novella Constance, Across is not one of those books.
Short but structurally complex, this book is a more subtle pleasure, one that benefits from more than one reading. A Canlit veteran, Cumyn is the author of a prior novella, The View from Tamischeira, (Dundurn Press) and five short-fiction collections, most recently The Young in Their Country and Other Stories (Enfield & Wizenty, 2010). This latest work features a consistently understated narrative voice, despite a storyline that involves a complete upending of the circumstances of his eponymous protagonist, the middle-aged Ottawa school teacher Constance Hardy.
The reader is slowly but confidently drawn through a complicated storyline that commences in medias res, with Constance beginning a confession in the locale where the plot eventually concludes—far from the wintery climes of our nation’s capital, in the blistering heat of her recently adopted home of Lahore, Pakistan. In a rooftop restaurant in that Punjabi metropolis, she sits across from Grant Lungren, who has travelled nearly 11,000 kilometres to confront her about the role he believes she played in his son James taking his own life. Constance abandoned Ottawa—and her job and husband and two children—days after an embarrassing public confrontation with James, who was her student, in front of the rest of her class, about the comparatively minor sin of having neglected his homework.
The incident and its mortal aftermath provide a overdue jolt to Constance’s own otherwise stagnant existence—workaday drudgery, an absent husband, and poor relations with her sons, one of whom has set up a hermitage in the basement. Constance explains her side of the filial suicide story to James’s jet-lagged dad, in the process revealing how and why she accompanied fellow pedagogue Afzal Khan, a man she barely knew, all the way to Pakistan. Despite her profound shift in habitat and surrounding cultural mores, Constance leaves the impression of someone whose personality will never change—until a twist ending suggests a serious realignment of her perspective and priorities.
Cumyn tells Constance’s tale in a sober narrative style, lending the prose an almost quotidian tone nearly throughout. For instance, here Constance is thinking of her lover Afzal while preparing dinner for her generally absent businessman husband, Tom:
I put on a CD of cello music, poured a glass of red wine and began to chop. Our old collie stayed close, leaning into my leg as I stood at the counter. Afzal never thought much of dogs. He refused to believe we actually let one live in the house with us. I glanced at the clock. Thom would be pulling into the driveway soon.
The voice and mood created are realistic, if somewhat devoid of dynamism. There are, however, occasional poetic flashes, as in the moment when Constance reflects on the experience of seeing Afzal upon his release from a Lahori prison:
The sight of him, how it flensed by soft tissue, tore muscle from bone, artery from organ. They hadn’t removed his fingers or a hand, as he feared they might. Was amputation preferable to the pain he’d been made to suffer? Sometimes I wonder. Two guards dragged him supported between them out the rear door of that hellish jail and dumped him in the street.
Alternating between Constance’s present-tense direct address of Grant in Pakistan and flashback sequences representing her explanations to him, Constance, Across requires an attentive audience of the sort accustomed to parsing the clues of the murder-mystery crime genre. A significant volume of information—about Constance, her new lover Afzal, a sex worker named Malika who is Afzal’s mother, Afzal’s extradition from Canada and subsequent arrest in Pakistan—is outlined in the novella’s first dozen pages.
The barrage of information can feel disorienting at times, requiring close concentration as the narrative toggles between the events in Canada and those in Pakistan. Near the end of the book, everything hinted at in the opening pages has been explicated. On second reading, all makes perfect sense and additional nuance is experienced more overtly. Whether the first reading confuses or compels may, on some levels, be a question whose answer varies from reader to reader.
Despite such a dramatic shift in mise-en-scène, this novella is uncompromisingly focused on character rather than setting. Ottawa may be cold and Lahore may be hot, but the one constant is Constance—the reader is kept closest to her inner emotional landscape and, given the intrinsic mediation of the flashback technique, at somewhat of a distance from the unfolding events.
Ever a world-weary cynic, Constance finds herself as constrained by South Asian social strictures as she was by the stifling politesse of North American educational conventions. But she’s also a sensitive soul who connects with her colleague Afzal after they witness a traumatic car accident on the bus ride to school in Canada, and throws all of herself into efforts to rescue him from a mysterious prison sentence in Pakistan. She does this despite her growing sense of alienation from the man, one that mirrors her discontent with her husband and nuclear family in the Canada she to which she vows never to return, even as Pakistan continues to bewilder her daily.
An unexpected turn of events occurs on the book’s final page, in the form of a dramatic action taken by Constance herself. When assessing a twist ending, I often ask: not only is this a surprise but, given everything that’s led up to it, is it the only authentic and appropriate conclusion for the book? I’m not fully convinced. What happens can either be read as the ultimate demonstration of how much Constance has transformed through her intercontinental journey—or, paradoxically, of how little. Could the book have done without this somewhat sensational turn, or even have been stronger without it?
I continue to ponder these possibilities, and it’s a satisfying, rather than frustrating, sensation. Perhaps it’s a credit to Cumyn as an author that rather than relying on linguistic pyrotechnics or providing overt answers, he slyly endows the reader with many questions, ones that persist weeks after putting the book down.
Quattro Books | 104 pages | $16.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1926802596