Walk the Blue Fields

Product Information

Subtle images of breakage and transgression are sprinkled throughout the narrative; the narrator twists fuchsia off the hedges; wandering sheep threaten to come through the shut gates of the house. In the seven stories here, Keegan pursues trajectories of failure and obsession with a measured, almost documentary reserve, and in a prose style that never deviates from clear, crystalline beauty throughout. The re-awakening of Margaret’s fertility is, of course, a symbol of rebirth that suggests the resurgence of a powerful femininity submerged under the patriarchy of twentieth-century Clericalism on the one hand and patrilineal land ownership on the other. As near to an epic as the collection contains, ‘The Forester’s Daughter’ is flanked by two slighter stories, ‘Dark Horses’ and ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’. The best stories here are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savoring them many years from now.

Dancing in the dark | Books | The Guardian Dancing in the dark | Books | The Guardian

While the scent of hay drifts up from neighbouring fields, a teenage immigrant articulates the reason for her going. In the final story, Stack is a character that will choose alcohol and his pet goat over people, and yet he breaks into one woman’s soul by telling her, “your heart is already broken”. In an echo of “The Long and Painful Death,” Stack reflects that his own death would be a long way off: “winter was coming …although he was no longer young his near future was a certainty” (180).In 1998 the Good Friday Agreement signalled an historic end to violent Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland with a new constitutional dispensation between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom based on the principle of consent, while the introduction of the Euro in 2002 helped to bring the Irish economy into the new currency union, accelerating an already rapid process of social and economic transformation.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan | Goodreads Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan | Goodreads

Stack, we are told, always knew that Margaret would leave, but “he couldn’t judge her, not even when she had taken his son’s hand and rowed away with strangers.

A sparrow swoops down onto the window ledge and pecks at his reflection, his beak striking the glass . Even before Small Things is out in English, its French translation, published last November, has won two prizes. Although they circle around similar themes, each story is in fact a different narrative world, with different rules, different possibilities for metaphor, or change. There are two priests who break vows and fall in love with women, a number of men who would rather work than love, and women who are both ignited and heartbroken by their power to hope. Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan is the long awaited second collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Small Things Like These.

Walk the Blue Fields, By Claire Keegan - The Independent Walk the Blue Fields, By Claire Keegan - The Independent

For his part, in the metaphor of his preparations for the onset of winter, Stack recognizes that the loss of his son to this strange woman brings to his mind eventual death, and the death of all his kind.As he walks home, his final, bland epiphany that “God is nature” surely delineates the limits of his spiritual horizon. Her follow-up has confirmed that she belongs in that fine story-telling tradition that harks back to Anton Chekhov.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan | PopMatters Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan | PopMatters

Yet, that these stories of marginal and isolated figures, who suffer from sexual and psychological damage, and most of all, irrepressible loneliness, should emerge at the peak of the boom in 2007, is hardly surprising. In that respect, ‘Surrender’ compliments ‘Night of the Quicken Trees’, the final story of the collection, which also undertakes an exploration of the Irish unwillingness to commit or communicate. So great is her yearning for whatever his work can supply that one story, "Surrender", is inspired by McGahern's own father, that terrifying patriarch who sat on a bench in Galway and ate 24 oranges before he married. To overcome his crisis of faith brought about by the memory of his love affair, the priest too goes to visit the Chinaman, who is reputed to have the power to cure ills.In the first story, "The Parting Gift", a girl leaves the home farm after a lifetime's abuse and sees what may be her first escalator: "You step on to moving stairs that frighten you. Walk the Blue Fields” must surely rank as one the most accurate portrayals of an Irish wedding in Irish writing—all drunkenness, packaged rituals and forced jokes—while also displaying the sharp ear Keegan has for the vibrant joviality of modern Irish life.