In many ways, it functions as a midpoint between Walk the Blue Fields and Small Things Like These, indicative of Keegan’s shift in mood towards a more tender, hopeful kind of fiction. It is a sublime, emotive story, the kind you emerge from as if having been away for a very long time: unsure, at first, how to continue with your own life. Like those in Walk the Blue Fields, the tragedy in Foster, first published in the New Yorker in 2010 and expanded into a short novel later that year, has already happened, its shape submerged just beneath the events of the narrative. It makes the stories more substantial and elemental than those in Antarctica, the slightest action taken by a character appearing not incidental but as if set in motion many years ago. The awful things that disturb her characters’ lives are only hinted at, having transpired some time before the present, or in the previous generation. In Walk the Blue Fields, which won the Edge Hill prize for short stories, Keegan pushes the violence back into the margins. They end in suicide, in rape, in families breaking apart. The stories in Antarctica swing irrevocably towards brutality. In Walk the Blue Fields, “A pale cloud was splitting in the April sky”, as the priest of the parish prepares to minister the marriage of the only woman he has ever loved.
In her first collection, Antarctica, “Clouds smashed into each other in the sky”, anticipating the terrible encounter between a married protagonist and the stranger who will leave her tied to a bed. And this landscape tells us things the characters cannot or do not know about the stories they inhabit. In her stories, there are the wide sky, the flowing river and the sea – we are often in County Wexford or County Wicklow in south-east Ireland, where Keegan grew up on a farm, the youngest of six children. In The Ginger Rogers Sermon, from her first, Antarctica (1999), the protagonist describes the trivial secrets they all keep from one another: “That’s the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don’t.” If you started, you would say the wrong things and you wouldn’t want it to end that way,” we learn of the protagonist in The Parting Gift, from Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields (2007). Within these families there is cruelty and violence, as well as deep springs of affection. Instead, the narrative gains its emotional resonance from the dynamics between characters.
But this figure never stands very far out in front. The protagonist changes – the father, the mother, a son or daughter. I n all Claire Keegan’s stories, there is a family.
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