Book Review: Walk the Blue Fields

Men will let you down.  They’ll sell your horse, marry you without loving you, disrupt your work, and choose the priesthood once they’ve slept with you.  Left to their own wits men make a muck of things, and only realize it when the woman’s gone.  Or so it goes in Walk the Blue Fields, Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories.

While the women in Keegan’s stories outpace the men in competence and character, her characters  are finely drawn and, in most cases, sympathetic.  In the title story a priest presides over the wedding day of the woman he loves.  The affair is revealed with a gradual grace that implicates the reader in the priest’s discomfort and search for grace.  In a deft stroke, the priest finds release (literally) not at the altar of a cathedral but in the small trailer of a Chinese healer.

Keegan explores eternal themes (infidelity, regret, loss, grace) that smoulder and shine against the verdant background.  Set in rural Ireland, where change seems to come slowly, her stories share a timeless quality that makes the timeframe difficult to pinpoint – they could happen as easily 100 years ago as they could today.

Keegan is best when she blends folklore and fairytales into her narratives.  “The Forester’s Daughter” is a gorgeous tale of compromise and betrayal whose climax is revealed through the matriarch’s masterful storytelling.  In “Night of the Quicken Trees” Keegan utilizes an old superstition about feet water (the water used to wash one’s feet in the evening that, if left inside overnight, could invite bad things into the house) and the formidable, mythical protective qualities of the Quicken tree (mountain ash.)  It’s a bizarre juxtaposition whose tension between invited danger and unseen protection shouldn’t work, but it does, beautifully.

Against the crystal clarity of stories like “The Forester’s Daughter” and “Night of the Quicken Trees,” Keegan’s portrayal of an unbearable sergeant in “Surrender” and the out-of-place, distinctly modern narrative of a writer at an artist’s retreat in “The Long and Painful Death” are leaden and uncharitable.  The characters are petulant and one-dimensional; Keegan’s considerable skill with nuance, which even makes the abusive mother in “The Parting Gift” sympathetic, is absent.  These are minor missteps in an otherwise excellent collection.

These are adult stories, poignant and cautiously hopeful.  Of Margaret, the heroine of “Night of the Quicken Trees,” Keegan writes:

Every creature seemed on the verge of flight.  Once, when Margaret was a child, (she) waited for a windy day, opened the umbrella and jumped off the boiler house wall, believing she would fly, and landed with a broken ankle on the car-road.  If only, in her adult life, her unfounded beliefs could be so abruptly disproved.  To be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness.

Adulthood’s darkness and the reconciliation of possibilities believed with realities experienced is beautifully illuminated in these stories.  Keegan invokes fairytales, but she begins after the lovers meet in the magical grove – the somber time after the happy ending.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan
Black Cat
ISBN: 0802170498
169 pages

Yell Softly Rating:  4 out of 5 Yells

*You can read Keegan’s short story Foster, published in the February 15, 2010 New Yorker, by clicking here.  (Link will take you to the story, in its entirety, on the New Yorker website.)  I highly recommend it.