Antarctica

A stunning new hardback edition of Claire Keegan's debut short story collection.

Sam's Review

Claire Keegan is a perennial favourite in most bookstores. Her novellas, Small Things Like These and Foster, are the epitome of less is more, telling heartbreaking, gut-punching stories in a fraction of the words that most authors require for far less impact. Every time we think everybody has read them, we see another burst of sales. Following their success, Keegan's publisher, Faber, recently reissued her earlier short story collections Walk the Blue Fields and Antarctica as beautiful demy hardbacks. I bought both and have recently finished the latter. It is of the same exceptional standard as Small Things Like These and Foster and plays with your emotions as adeptly as both titles, but with an acid tongue and sharpened nails.

The two stories that open Antarctica left me reeling, with my jaw somewhere around my ankles. Keegan opens the book with a line that accepts James Joyce's challenge to tell a story in a single sentence: "Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man.” This titular story then adopts the ostensibly plain domestic descriptions Keegan deploys to great effect in her much-loved novellas. She adds layer upon layer to her portrait of an ordinary life until we can live within the woman's content, if dull, existence. The man she turns to for excitement, illicit and yet homespun, is added to the scene. And then, just as we think we know what's coming, Keegan produces a scalpel and slices the canvas she's created, revealing something far darker underneath. I literally lost my breath.

The second story, Love In The Tall Grass, also tells of an affair, ends with a twist I could not have seen coming, and caused me to re-read the final paragraphs repeatedly to see how Keegan conjured this magic. And yet, despite the similarities, the two stories are entirely different in sentiment, morality, and outcome. As one-two punches go, Muhammad Ali would be proud.

Keegan fills the book with characters of depth and conflict, love and malice. I could write an in-depth review of everyone: of the racist keeping a man captive in his shed, the sisters divided by their father’s expectations and their degree of attractiveness, and the family returning to a home that may no longer be theirs. If I had any one of these ideas, I would envision it as a novel, creating pages of backstory and exposition, place and setting. The portraits I painted would take up a wall. Fascinating characters spill in their dozens from Keegan’s pen to the page, and she contains everyone within an exquisitely crafted photo frame. That is why she is a great writer, and why I am reading her books.