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Antarctica
By Claire Keegan
This auspicious debut collection of short stories
comes highly recommended, since some of the pieces here have already
garnered garlands like the Martin Healy Prize, the Francis MacManus
Award and the William Trevor Prize, and been published and broadcast
extensively. It is not difficult to see why, as Keegan does several
things very well.
Her own background consists of an upbringing in
rural Co Wexford, a degree in English and Political Science from
Loyola University in New Orleans, and a Masters in Creative Writing
from the University of Wales in Cardiff. All this experience is
drawn upon, not only in terms of location - seven of the stories
are set in Ireland, six in America, and two across the water - but
also in appropriate and exact use of relevant idiom.
Several of the stories - ‘Where the Water’s Deepest’,
‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’, ‘Storms’, ‘The Singing Cashier’, ‘Burns’,
‘Men and Women’, ‘A Scent of Winter’ and ‘The Burning Palms’ - deal
with childhood or early adolescence, whether first or third person
narratives, and delineate a child’s or adolescent’s increasing perception
of an often senselessly cruel and hostile adult world he or she
is struggling to understand. Keegan specialises in the recounting
of bizarre experiences and extreme situations in an understated,
deadpan manner, but this domestication of perspective never becomes
either too genteelly sanitised or too gratuitously shocking, since
all effects are achieved by steady yet subtle implication.
The title story concerns a happily married woman’s
just-for-the-sake-of-it, just-to-see-what-it’s-like infidelity,
a playful but self-indulgent caprice for which she gets rather more
than she bargained. ‘Storms’ charts the effects of a mother’s descent
into madness on her daughter. ‘The Singing Cashier’ deftly incorporates
the Fred West story into a piece about a young woman who trades
sex for food: ‘I drank Fred West’s milk while my sister was fucking
the postman’ is one of the few more up front, in-your-face declarations
in the book. ‘Burns’ deals with a man and his children and his second
wife (the kids’ step mom) in their attempt to exorcise the ghost
of his first wife, the natural but abusive mother of the children.
In ‘A Scent of Winter’ a Southern man has taken the law into his
own hands with his now anorexic wife’s black rapist, and seeks legal
advice about how best to avoid detection. In ‘You Can’t Be Too Careful’
a murderer frames the narrator. ‘Passport Soup’ is a short but searing
tale, reminiscent in theme of Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child
in Time, and in terseness of tone - if not plainness of language
- to the more successful stories of Raymond Carver, in which a wife
mentally tortures her husband for losing their daughter. Although
it may be an over-obvious reference point, it is still high praise
to mention that there is more than a touch of the Flannery O’Connoresque
Southern Gothic about the stories set in the States.
Nascent feminism in rural Ireland is another recurring
thread, and in ‘Storms’, ‘Quare Name for a Boy’, ‘Men and Women’
and ‘Sisters’ we meet women and girls living in isolation in the
Irish countryside, giving over their lives to caring for mostly
ungrateful men. However, rather than becoming bleakly resigned to
their situation, sooner or later Keegan’s characters make a gesture
of defiance, and take some form of affirmative action. She also
writes with almost equal fluency in both male and female voices
and from those points of view, and it is no accident that ‘Men and
Women’ is arguably the most perfectly realised story in the collection,
although I would be very surprised if the familial sexual politics
it contains were that of contemporary Ireland.
This book is a grower, and its pleasures and virtues
sneak up on you slowly. Like good poetry, one’s appreciation increases
with repeated readings. Despite, or more probably because of, the
detachment, coolness and iciness, there’s fire down below. Finally,
this woman is great at leave-it-hanging endings.
Keegan has just completed an M Phil in Creative
Writing at Trinity College, and is currently embarked on a novel.
Not only does this volume give just cause to revise upward one’s
opinion of such courses, but its wonderfully accurate descriptive
passages and scene-setting, and its attention to the nuances of
language, place and character, auger very well for what is yet to
come.
First published in Books Ireland
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