The stories collected in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields are breathtaking.  She writes perfect compositions of people and place (both are characters in her stories), setting them against brilliantly evoked and unique moments in time.  Her characters live in a rural  Ireland resting for one last gasp on the cusp of modernity. Her stories breathe the air of  the fields and small towns of the post-war, pre-internet (pre-cell phones and reverse immigration and economic boom) years.  Keegan’s characters are neither saints nor sinners but people struggling to find some truth in the way they live their lives.  A priest in love with a woman, a brother unable to protect his sister from a fallen father, a woman who marries because another offer might not come, a woman who takes over the house of her dead ex-lover and who exorcises more than his ghost from the windswept place. Strange people in strange places and yet they all seemed so familiar to me: Keegan makes them real with her lyrical but straightforward story-telling.

I usually hate the use of “you” in a narrative but Keegan has the gift.  She placed me firmly in the protagonist role in “The Parting Gift”, the story of a young girl leaving Ireland and her abusive father and ineffective mother, and I was roiling in fear, frustration, and anticipation of what immigration would mean for me.  “The Forester’s Daughter” had many characters, all of them perfectly rendered and unique, all coming together in a struggle of identification and truth, and surviving a trial by fire.  Keegan makes the task of short-story writing look easy.  Her writing does not seem crafted or stylized; she writes as if she were just the finest story-teller at the table tonight (as is one of the characters in the story) and I was held enthralled.

“The Long and Painful Death” is a lovely story about the difficulties of writing, told as one day in the life of a distracted but deeply observant woman, who in the end gets us to the place where inspiration and work meet to create good writing.  I felt as if Keegan gave us a glimpse into her own life, and I was pleased to be granted a peek.

“Walk the Blue Fields” is the most beautiful story in the collection, with so many quotable lines describing  Irish countryside, a bride and her groom, the feelings the priest has for the girl he has married off to another, his visit to a Chinese practitioner of massage and relief, and his search for God.  He doesn’t question the existence of God,  just his location.  We are there when “God is answering back.  All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes.  A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field.  Overhead, the stars have rolled into place.  God is nature.”  The wild and green and haunting and deeply beautiful nature that is rural Ireland.  A place where one feels “strange…to be alive” and yet so grateful for the living.