Hurrah for the judges of the Orwell Prize for celebrating it as a political act. The suggestion of doctrine, of ideology, even of a determined attitude, is alien to the experience of reading Small Things like These. Keegan has said that the main character of her new novel is ‘a Christian who cannot practise his Christianity in Ireland’. Foster, which first appeared in the New Yorker before being published as a book, is a compact exploration of her recurring subjects: loss of a parent, dependence on land, secrecy. The short stories in her two collections, Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields, include a coming out in America and a sex thriller set in an English cathedral city, but most of them take place in the Irish countryside. She has published four books in 23 years, none more than 210 pages long. You think you are just looking – it turns out you are travelling. Her inner and outer landscapes, the palpable and the imagined, are all of a piece. Keegan’s fiction makes most novels look too fancy her short stories make most prose seem too plain. I shall not see it, at least not for a while the words on the page are lodged in my head. Foster, published in 2010, has been filmed as The Quiet Girl. Small Things like These has just won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and been longlisted for the Booker. T his year Claire Keegan, long esteemed, became fêted.
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