"Small things like these" by Claire Keegan (Faber 2021)

110 pages. It's 1985, Ireland, nearly Xmas. Bill Furlong, 40, a coal/wood supplier, has a clever wife and 5 daughters. He's never known who his father was. He was helped by the widow where his mother had been a maid, and Ned had been a lodger. Bill's kind. His wife thinks he's too generous.

Once when he delivered to the convent (also a laundry) he was surprised that the girls were locked in and keen to get out. Now when he delivers to the convent he finds a girl in the coal shed. She says she was a 14-week baby. He takes her to the nuns who are nice to her. On Xmas eve there's snow. He treats his workers to a cafe meal. The owner hints that he shouldn't upset the church - they're all in it together. He wants his kids to go to the good Catholic school. Someone points out that he and Ned look like each other. He sees crows eat and later get eaten.

On the way home he gets some shoes as a present for his wife. He wonders if Ned (now in hospital) is his father (Ned's never hinted that he is). He passes the convent and finds the girl in the coal shed again. He takes her away - not to the priest, because Bill realises he knows what goes on in the convent. He takes the barefoot girl through the town centre to his house, still carrying the shoe-box.

Feels like a too long short story.

A note at the end says that the last "Magdalen laundry" closed in 1996.

• "and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary" (p.2) - doesn't sound right
• "a dog was licking something from a tin can, pushing it noisily across the frozen pavement with his nose" (p.51) - I like this

Other reviews

• Lamorna Ash (Why, then, does Small Things Like These not feel quite as devastating, as lasting, as Keegan’s previous work? Perhaps, for the first time in her writing, the lightness here has become too light – is kept too far away from the darkness that lurks at the other side of the town.)
• THÚY ĐINH
• elizabeth baines' reading group

"Walk the blue fields" by Claire Keegan (Faber and Faber, 2007)

• The Parting Gift - The story begins with

  When sunlight reaches the foot of the dressing table, you get up and look through the suitcase again. It's hot in New York but it may turn cold in winter. All morning the bantam cocks have crowed. It's not something you will miss. You must dress and wash, polish your shoes. Outside, dew lies on the fields, white and blank as pages. Soon the sun will burn it off. It's a fine day for the hay

  An Irish girl's leaving her farm for the States. Her mother (who sometimes made her share her father's bed) is sad. Her brother, who gives her a lift to the airport, says (at last) that he's sorry he didn't help, and that he's not going to take on the farm. But she thinks she will.
  In "The scent of the hay drifts up from neighbouring fields. As soon as the dew burns it off, the Rudd brothers will be out in the meadows" (p.4) I wonder if "it" should be there.
• Walk the blue fields - The most impressive story I've read for a while. After a wedding he's conducted, a priest mixes with the already drunk guests. He has a secret. The conversation is loose, witty.

  'Is that glass half full or half empty would you say, Father?' 'It's whatever you think,' the priest says. 'Well, I don't know what else you've been drinking,' the woman says, 'but surely it can't be one without being the other.' The barber frowns and then its meaning registers.

  He walks away. We learn that he'd had an affair with the bride, who gave him an ultimatum - leave the church or leave her. He stumbles upon the caravan of a Chinese man he'd heard about at the reception. The Chinese man's English is poor, but his remedies are trusted. He gives the priest a massage. It helps.
• Dark horses - A man could have married a woman had it not been for her horses, or more likely, drink. The weakest story in the collection.
• The forester's daughter - a woman in an unhappy marriage with a farmer has 3 children - a clever girl, a simpleton and another son. At a social gathering she tells a story about a woman in an unhappy marriage who had sex with a salesman leading to a girl's birth. At the end, the family stand in the lane watching their home burn down. It's a long story with too many dreams. There are surprising phrases: "The retriever has sheltered for the night under the trees and the forester has, in fact, roused him from a dream of ponies chasing him through a bog." (dog's PoV, p.58) and "He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people when they speak say useless things" (dog's PoV, p.64); "In the sky a few early stars are shining of their own accord" (p.61).
• Close to the water's edge - A boy has a holiday with his mother and outspoken step-father. He goes for a swim and gets into difficulties. The ending provides more information about his mother.
• Surrender - A sergeant receives a letter and her ring from his fiancee. He decides that next day he'll visit her (probably to propose) - a long bicycle ride. But first he makes a local visit. Much is left unsaid.
• Night of the quicken trees - Infused with folklore. A woman nearly menopausal moves into a cottage left her by a relative - a priest who she'd had a child by, a cot-death victim. In the next cottage lives a 54 year old bachelor, a virgin who has a live-in goat. She gets her future told, acquires a reputation as a healer, has a child by the bachelor and a few years later, leaves. I finally liked the story more than I expected to.

It's the endings that I learnt the most from.

Other reviews

• Anne Enright (Although they circle around similar themes, each story is in fact a different narrative world, with different rules, different possibilities for metaphor, or change. )
• Rachel Balik (Critics have compared Keegan to Anton Chekhov, perhaps because she captures the pathos of an entire nationality the way he does. But none of the melodrama of Chekhov's characters is present in Keegan's)
• Olivia Heal (There is surely something in the Irish voice that is different. The sense of belonging is coupled, perhaps naturally, with one of exile.)