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Constance, Across

by Richard Cumyn,
Toronto: Quattro Press
96 pp., $16.95

Richard Cumyn has published five collections of short fiction and one novella previous to Constance, Across, his second novella. He opens this new novella with a quotation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of the more famous ones about Marlowe’s view that “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside.” Like Conrad, Cumyn deals with clashes between belief systems and the world’s rampant inhumanity, but his main character, Constance Hardy, is far less interesting than Marlowe and less plausible.

Constance is an Ottawa school teacher whose marriage is imploding, along with her relationship with her two sons. Her son Patrick has given up on the family and hides out in the basement. Her other son, Colin, is trying to behave normally, but the obvious fractures in the family make communication beyond the superficial impossible.

The narrative is directed to Grant Lundgren, the father of a boy who is in Constance’s English class and who commits suicide. Grant had also loaned Constance’s husband Tom a significant amount of money to help Tom get a business going. All these aspects of the novella work, but Cumyn has Constance telling Grant the story while both are in Lahore, Pakistan. The novella reveals the past and what has brought the two to this meeting, and points to a difficult future for both.

Constance takes her unhappiness to an extreme level. She falls in love with a colleague, a handsome man from Pakistan, and in order to avoid seeing Grant after his son’s death, she takes off, leaving her own sons. And she takes off with Afzal Khan, a man she barely knows and who is being deported. It’s all too much to be believable as she evidently cares about Patrick and Colin: she stays in touch daily by email. Leaving her husband is insignificant as she has stopped loving him, but her lightning development of feelings for Afzal is crazy. Lust would be understandable, but Cumyn makes the connection much stronger and deeper than that, and the novella shows the profound connection Constance develops for her new country, even though she will never be fully accepted and will never–by her own admission—understand the rules of the Islamic world, especially the rules guiding behaviour of women.

The break that Constance makes with her job, family, and country happens with breath-taking speed. That circumstance is somewhat vexing for readers as we don’t know much about her before she turns her world upside down. The plot is a huge hurdle to comprehending Constance. And it certainly affects readers’ abilities to care about what she does.

Cumyn’s style is literary, dotted with allusions and wit: Constance notes, “I could be late, lax, negligent, eccentric and domineering, but not to record attendance in homeroom every day was a serious and immediately noted breach of duty.” The problems of the Canadian public school system get ramped up until Cumyn is tackling gigantic world issues. And like Conrad, Cumyn uses a journey to provide different perspectives.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Conrad’s novella and Cumyn’s is that Conrad leaves us with questions and Cumyn seems to be trying to give answers in a didactic fashion. Marlowe may have believed that the fascinating part was outside the kernel, but Conrad shows us inside and outside.

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