Mary-Ann Constantine's first collection, The Breathing (Planet 2008), had an uneasy sense of another world, not so much supernatural as a reality we dare not acknowledge in our daily lives. The stories were tantalising glimpses into states of mind; strange, perhaps, but intensely real. In All the Souls , the haunting is a more overt theme but the stories have the same intensity of imagined experience.The first story, 'The Collectors', almost a novella in itself, tells the tale of three 'collectors' in nineteenth-century Brittany. Two are primarily medical men, determined to prove the continued existence of leprosy in the rural population. The third, Le Coadic, is a collector of folklore, particularly stories and traditions concerning the Anaon: trapped and purgatorial souls haunting every twig of the trees like a flock of minute, restless birds. One of these souls narrates much of the story as they watch and to some degree entrap the collector.Several other stories are set in Brittany but the rest are in Wales, including a tender, humorous one woven around a displaced angel, transferred from its incinerated chapel to Aberystwyth museum.
The fate of this angel becomes an obsession of an old parishioner, but the story narrated by her embarrasses her eleven-year-old grandson who has to report weekly on the angel's state of health. While this story is very much of the present, 'Centaur' is set in a future without fuel and without motor vehicles. The ageing narrator remembers a time when people were still identified with their cars and tractors. The final 'Lake Story' is a gentle account of a happy summer's day picnic for two women and their young children beside a lake but one of the women is dead. She is still preoccupied by the safety of her living children but 'survives' as one of the Beirdd y Mynnydd , the ghostly poets who inhabit the place, and she becomes identified with the legendary lady of the lake. The imagery of life lived in two elements, like water and air, beautifully creates the double reality of the two friends.The odd little story 'Fish' seems to deal only with the living or partly living: two exhausted, over-worked mothers of young children, but it has within it a ritual, a kind of private magic against the chaos of their lives. It is this sense of magic: spells, ritual, talisman, which links these stories and reveals the hidden currents which shape our daily lives.
As in The Breathing , the sense of place is very strong in these stories. Constantine's atmospheric creation of 'the dark pool where willow and alder crowd and tangle thousands of branches hung with millions of souls' is at the heart of 'The Collectors'. The tilled field lost to the waste of war in 'Warrior' is vividly realised. The dramatic landscape of 'Lancaut', with its patient saint, is a contrast but ultimately a haven and a means of release for the bitter, tormented narrator.This collection will haunt its readers and enhance the author's reputation for subtle and intriguing storytelling of a high order.Caroline ClarkIt is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com , with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com , trwy ganiat'd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.