Looking for the meaning of life? Come to Constantine Phipps’ poetic theme park

A favourite game of mine is to imagine Virgil and Homer today, plying their trade among the supermarkets and office blocks. What would they sing? Can modern life aspire to the epic, and can such a form still be understandable, even useful? C.S. Lewis, though he did translate the Aeneid beautifully, didn’t quite manage a similar feat with his bizarre modern epic, Dymer.

It’s not a field many wish to enter. And yet Constantine Phipps, in his third book, What You Want, has made not only an epic, but a didactic epic, accessible, relevant and involving. In precise, lucidly flowing iambic pentameters, the poem is a meditation on the nature of being, married with a strong narrative. It stands aware of its influences: Lucretius is its guiding spirit and Dante its model. It also forges something new. This is rather an extraordinary, even sublime, achievement.

Phipps’s first novel, Careful with the Sharks, was a comedy of manners; his second, Among the Thin Ghosts, was a more serious human drama, in the title of which — a quotation from the Aeneid — we find the roots of this long-form poem. All epic heroes must make the journey into the underworld in order to prove their status. Odysseus, Aeneas, the Redcrosse Knight, Adam: each partakes in knowledge of the Other.

And so too does the hero of What You Want, which is firmly rooted in our reality of talk shows, fashion designers and bankers. Patrick is an ordinary bloke whose wife leaves him after one affair too many. Overdosing on pills after a visit to ‘Themeparkland’, he hallucinates a vision of it, which forms the basis of the poem. Patrick wanted to be an archaeologist: it is appropriate that his dream digs into himself, the past and the very nature of society.