The Dressing Up Box by David Constantine

The Dressing Up Box by David Constantine

Published in the UK by Comma Press on the 19th September 2019

T for my 2020 Alphabet Soup Challenge

How I got this book:

Received a review copy from the publisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Against the backdrop of war, a group of children barricade themselves in an abandoned townhouse, cherishing what’s left of their innocence with the help of a dressing-up box...

A deep-sea diver takes to being suspended for hours at a time on the end of a line not long enough to reach the seabed...

An aging widower moves into the shed at the end of his garden to plan out his ‘endgame’ surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of hoarded curiosities...

The characters in David Constantine’s fifth collection are all in pursuit of sanctuary; the violence and mendacity of the outside world presses in from all sides – be it the ritualised brutality suffered by children at a Catholic orphanage, or the harrowing videos shared among refugees of an atrocity ‘back home’. In each case, the characters withdraw into themselves, sometimes abandoning language altogether, until something breaks and they can retreat no further. In Constantine’s luminous prose, these stories capture such moments in all their clarity; moments when an entire life seems to hang in the balance, the past’s betrayals exposed, its ghosts dragged out into the daylight; moments in which the possibility of defiance and redemption is everything.


The Dressing Up Box is a wonderfully dark collection of sixteen short stories. Constantine atmospherically depicts characters who are at, or very near to, the end of their tethers and follows them to either disaster or redemption. My favourite of the collection is the title story, The Dressing Up Box, because I appreciated its enclosed children's environment set against the undescribed threat of violent adults outside. I was reminded of The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan, one of my favourite novels, and The Dressing Up Box has a similar juxtaposition of a limitless world of imagination constrained within quite a claustrophobic physical space. I also really liked A Retired Librarian and Autumn Ladies' Tresses for their strong portrayals of older women, Neighbourhood Watch for the Christmas horror with which I could completely sympathise, and Ashton And Elaine which, as the last story, I felt provided a perfect counterpoint to The Dressing Up Box at the start. Ashton's attempts to recover from the cruel treatment he endured gave a good sense of closure after the children step in to the unknown at the beginning and all we have seen through the intervening stories.

I wasn't as gripped by every story which, I suppose, is only to be expected in such a varied collection. Brecchia's long descriptive introduction baffled me initially so I struggled to get into this story once it did start to move, and I didn't particularly empathise with Nerval in Rue de la Vielle-Lanterne although, having looked up his life, I am now intrigued to learn more about this poet prior to those final days. Constantine is deeply concerned with the inner lives of his characters so these stories are generally slow moving an introspective which suited me well, but might not be as rewarding to readers who prefer active tales. I'm happy to have been given this opportunity to discover his work here and look forward to reading his earlier story collections in due course.

Etsy Find!
	Personalised  Dressing Up Box by Little Bow Chic Gifts in Manchester, England Click pic to visit Etsy Shop

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