YES! I KNOW IT’S DECEMBER! (But I’m determined to finish my #NovNov reviews. Also, there’s more to come).
Claire Keegan occupied a good part of my 2022 #NovNov efforts, and I was rewarded – I love her stories. This year’s Keegan selections – The Forester’s Daughter and So Late in the Day – were fantastic (actually, they’re probably short stories, not novellas, but I have both as neat, printed books so….).
Both stories tell of men and the women they marry. One is a modern story, the other set in the seventies. One is firmly styled in the here and now, the other has a fairy-tale quality. Both stories examine the cost of pride.
In The Forester’s Daughter, we meet a farming family, headed by Victor Deegan. Victor has ‘three teenagers, the milking and the mortgage’, and a deeply dissatisfied wife. Victor finds a dog and gives it as a present to his only daughter. The dog is a harbringer of change in the Deegan family.
…Deegan gives the dog to the first child he sees. It happens to be his youngest and it happens to be the girl’s birthday. And so the girl, whose father has never given her so much as a tender word, embraces the retriever and with it the possibility that Deegan loves her, after all.
So Late in the Day tells the story of Cathal, who, on a bus trip home from work, ponders the emptiness of a long weekend ahead. His mind agitates over a woman named Sabrine, with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently.
How does Keegan do it? These taut and searing little stories, brimming with what I would class as ‘overwhelming’ emotions (pride, shame and desire)?
And none of it at the expense of descriptions that I want to immerse myself in. The oak trees in The Forester’s Daughter are almost a standalone character (granted, I’m a bit obsessed with oaks at the moment).
It is autumn. Brown oak leaves are twisting in dry spasms around the yard.
The difference between the two stories is that one had an ending that made me laugh mirthlessly, the other left me sad and reflective.
I’ll say no more other than the fact that I am a Keegan devotee.
4/5 (for both)