Quite Bookish

Claire Keegan is one of my favourite writers, and probably one of the finest exponents of the short form writing today.

Her themes are familiar; the worlds she describes are small and contained, mostly concerned with provincial Ireland and matters domestic. In unnoticed ordinary lives, in tight communities, she finds universal themes. She describes them with brevity and clarity, as if they are cut glass which may slip through your fingers and shatter.

Keegan is primarily a short story writer, and this slim long-short-story/ short-novella first appeared in The New Yorker.

It concerns Cathal, who is taking a bus home from work after another uneventful Friday at his office in Dublin. He is a lonely figure; his work colleagues worry about his state of mind, but we see little to suggest that he is likely to fall apart. Instead, as is often the case with Keegan’s characters, he lives not so much a life of quiet desperation as one of silent emotional containment. From the outside, we can see the tragedy of it all if we choose to, but we might also notice the quiet dignity in his ability to keep going.

It concerns a relationship he had with Sabine, a French woman who had grown up in Normandy, far more demonstrative and creative in her approach to life than Cathal. It’s easy to see the attraction that Cathal felt for her. She gives him access to emotional landscapes that he cannot access alone.

But that’s a difficult role for anyone to fulfil, and sure enough, romance does not run smoothly. Cathal cannot adjust to Sabine the idea, becoming Sabine, the rounded, living, breathing woman with her foibles and imperfections. Decisions we make come to haunt us in ways we might never have imagined at the time of their making.

There is never a word out of place in Keegan’s stories, and she is often compared to one of my favourite writers, John McGahern, another Irish master of the short form. I think that’s a fair comparison, but it doesn’t fully do justice to Keegan’s singular talent for cooly mining the emotional lives of her characters. Her stories are controlled and intense, and utterly compelling.

If you’ve never read her work before, then this is a good place to start.