Claire Keegan has been hailed as the most important new, young voice coming out of Ireland. Fellow Irish writer, and winner of the Booker prize for her novel ‘The Gathering’ Anne Enright aptly describes the effect of her short stories as taking the clichés of Irish rural life and setting them ablaze. What are these clichés? The priest, the man who lets the drink in him speak, the healers and seers, the superstitions and folktales. But Keegan is never fey; quite the opposite. The priest in the title story of this collection, Walk The Blue Fields, is spiritually empty. He has just officiated at the wedding of the woman he has himself known, in the full biblical sense; he pays a visit to the Chinese healer living in a caravan, who pummels and strikes him until his resistance fades. And although he cannot go back to where he was, he finds a new way of being in the world.
The men in these stories are are often weak, and give in to their weaknesses; there is an abusive father, or the man who says words in anger when he ‘has the drink on him’, loses the woman he loves and quietly goes to the dogs, dreaming her back to his side every night. There is Deegan, who takes a wife as the next step after buying a herd of Fresian cows, putting electric fences round his land and installing the milking unit. Little wonder, then, that the wife eventually falls for the man who comes round selling roses. Only Deegan cannot understand what she’s been missing all the years. The women are far more in tune with themselves and with the past, which comes back in the form of customs and traditions, and with present developments. ‘Now that Stack knew a woman, there grew the knowledge that he would never understand women. They could smell rain, read doctors’ handwriting, hear the grass growing.’ It is the women who understand and cope with the world. The men on the other hand are puzzled by it, and by women.
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