The trick is to start at the beginning. The first two tales in this collection are among the finest short fiction I have read in several years, which includes the new tales in John McGahern's posthumous New and Selected Stories. That's how good Keegan can be.
The remarkable title tale follows a priest on the day of a wedding. The chapel is crowded. The bride is disconcertingly late. "A thrill of doubt" spreads through the pews. A frisson of scandal in the making. But soon, "John Lawlor came up the steps with his only child and gave her away." The foreboding is palpable.
Lawlor gives the bride away, despite misgivings. The priest officiates, then later, outside the chapel, alone, and pondering life's bitter quirks, he spies a snatch of blown-away bridal veil caught in a yew. He reaches up. It is an ordinary moment and a symbolic one - the weight of which does not register for pages and then its poignancy lies like an anchor in the heart.
This tale has everything: a wonderful set-piece wedding bash, indiscretions, innuendo and a Chinese labourer with cures for all ailments, including the torments of the heart. Its landscape is Irish as if written by Turgenev, its daring turns of phrase akin to Isaac Babel.
But what, in the end, makes the tale sensational is its capacity for expansion. The story's vanishing point runs way beyond the horizon of the narrative. You feel you know the childhood of the bride, her father's trials, the hopeless future she now confronts, the priest's onward duty, his life of privation secured by the cloth. And you know the world in which the story is set, and about a people conditioned by the land. At times it feels dreamed, yet it's clearly earthed, the dream being shadow, the land yielding light.
"Parting Gift", which opens the book, is a gem of compactness. It marks the start of a young woman's journey away from the slavery of the farm, from her parents, and from the room in which her father abu-sed her, an act condoned by her mother's fear. Its centre of gravity resonates with such force that the story could easily stretch to a novel.
Tom Adair, The Scotsman, June 2007
In Walk the Blue Fields, Keegan remains loyal to her roots, basing all bar one of the seven works in Ireland. Each story is a slow exploration of an episode in the life of one or more characters, each palpably bursting with sorrow and a sense of isolation: from the unhappy marriage of Martha and Deegan in The Forester’s Daughter to the long-lost love affair that haunts the priest in the title story.
Despite their undoubtedly pastoral tone, the stories are not straight but incorporate elements of the surreal. Dogs talk, folklore is brought to life and strange customs add a black-humoured edge to several of the stories.
Keegan’s voice is unmistakably Irish. But despite the young person who leaves for America in the first tale and the presence of a priest in both Night of the Quicken Treesand Walk the Blue Fields, the author manages to find an individual voice that does not merely speak of quintessentially Irish matters.
The pace of the stories is slow, but this exploits the potential of the reduced length to the full: characters are well developed, but by any first tinges of boredom, the story is drawing to a close
With their different themes, Keegan ........ has mastered the art of filling a reduced word count with a narrative that would not sustain a novel, yet develops, slowly unravelling to reveal the whole picture only by the end of the tale. For a delve into modern short story writing, [this] is a pleasing place to start.
timesonline.co.uk
Some useful book club links (external links: open new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities