Short Stories:In 1999, Claire Keegan made a highly auspicious debut with her short-story collection, Antarctica.
Walk the Blue Fields Claire Keegan Faber and Faber, 163pp. £10.99.
Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic gushed superlatives - "oblique genius", "exceptionally gifted", "remarkably poetic vision" - and literary awards mounted. Since then, no less an authority than Declan Kiberd has declared Keegan to be "a writer already touched by greatness" whose mastery of the short- story form is comparable to that of John McGahern. Not since Sean O'Faolain anointed Neil Jordan as his - and Joyce's - heir on the publication of Night in Tunisiain 1976 has a young Irish short-story writer been so rapturously received.
Walk the Blue Fields, Keegan's much-anticipated follow-up volume, proves that such critical acclaim was not misplaced. Although much shorter than Antarctica - seven stories as opposed to 15 - the collection extends Keegan's shrewd and penetrating observation of the vulnerable and mysterious depths of individual lives. Throughout, the narrow confines of rural lives are used to uncover the outlines of a general human condition characterised by ignorance and yearning. Each story remains resolutely anchored in a web of human relations, concerned with the implications of "where one step can lead", be it a fateful choice or a misunderstood gesture. In contrast to many of her contemporaries, Keegan seems little interested in using the short story as a vehicle for socio-cultural critique. Her settings are dense with social detail, yet she refuses to allow public forces to usurp her protagonists' private cravings for meaning and authenticity.
Keegan's portrayal of painful experience is bracingly unsentimental. The absence of self-pity is exemplified by the opening story, The Parting Gift, which describes a daughter's last morning with her family before she emigrates to the US. As in many of Keegan's stories, the girl is never named, though she is no less real for that. Indeed, her namelessness underlines her numbness, as does the story's second-person point of view, which evokes the speaker's detachment from the events she describes, while simultaneously assuming a degree of intimacy on the reader's part. Having made us more malleable, this dispassionate voice reveals itself to be the voice of trauma, without ever breaking register. Such deft management of tone accentuates the girl's emotional diminishment, which is further amplified by her listless movement through contracting spaces: from kitchen to car to toilet cubicle.
The Parting Giftsuggests that Keegan's technique may be partly indebted to Hemingway's "iceberg" aesthetic, where four-fifths of the narrative lurks beneath the surface of the text. Her stories are remarkable not so much for what they leave out as for their muted forms of signification. This is seen to good effect in Close to the Water's Edge, which centres on a young man's visit to his mother and his rich, reactionary stepfather on the Texas coast. The ocean is much more than a passive backdrop to the trio's fractious meal in an expensive restaurant. It gradually emerges as the element that symbolises freedom for the troubled protagonist, as it once did for his unfulfilled grandmother. Yet the story's symbolic pattern grows more complex as the narrative unfolds, so that apparently incidental images - a chained parrot, a bound lobster - assume a countervailing emblematic significance.
IF HEMINGWAY ISan oblique influence in these stories, then McGahern is a central interlocutory presence. Walk the Blue Fieldsis an intriguing homage to the late Leitrim writer. Throughout the first five stories, there is an alluvial build-up of idiomatic and thematic allusion - even the cover image of a solitary yew tree exudes a McGahernesque pathos - which eventually becomes explicit in the penultimate story, Surrender, subtitled "after McGahern". The story was inspired by McGahern's recollection in Memoirof his father telling how, when he knew he was going to be married, he bought two dozen oranges and ate them on a park bench in Galway. Keegan's imaginative response to this stray memory is fascinatingly suggestive in the way it adds resonance to it by releasing its deeper meanings, making the story a compelling act of creative elaboration.
Keegan's thematic debt to McGahern is most evident in her dramatisation of the illusions and disillusions of love. Like him, she uses epiphanies sparingly to crystallise the pain as well as the possibilities of different kinds of desire. So whereas the sergeant in Surrendercomes to realise that "Everything was made for something else in whose presence things ran smoothly", the priest in the title story is tortured by the knowledge that "two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human".
OTHER LOVELORN PROTAGONISTSseem robbed of the authority to be themselves. Both Martha in The Forester's Daughterand Margaret in Night of the Quicken Treesfeel that something nameless and numinous has evaded them. Indeed, Martha's sense that "so much of her life has revolved around things that never happened" recalls McGahern's plangent evocation in Doorwaysof how "the small events we look forward to" become "minute replicas of the expectation that we call the rest of our life". Martha's husband harbours his own silent pain; for him, "Dreaming has become the closest thing to having someone to talk to". If such lines confirm that life is mostly a sorrowful mystery in Walk the Blue Fields, they also bear out McGahern's claim that "the quality of the seeing is more important than the quality of the message. If the writing truly sees, then it is liberating".
Liam Harte lectures in Irish literature at the University of Manchester. His latest book,Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society , has just been published by Palgrave MacmillanShort Stories.