Affairs, murders, cockroaches, dances, pregnancies, the complexities of marriage, sibling relationships, and the view of the world from a child’s eye: it’s all here in Claire Keegan’s first short story collection Antarctica!
As much as I usually enjoy Keegan’s fiction, I found Antarctica to be a really weak short story collection with not many that really stood out and more than a few that were instantly forgettable.
Of the several stories here about extramarital affairs, the titular story is by far the best, not just out of that sub-grouping but in the entire book. It’s about a middle-aged woman looking to have an affair, meeting a seemingly harmless chap in a bar, and… the twist. It’s a very engaging story and a strong way to start.
Unfortunately, there are only scattered moments in the following stories that stand out, rather than the stories in their entirety themselves being the stars. The reveal in The Singing Cashier, about a pair of sisters, the older of whom is hooking up with the postman, was unexpected and I liked how the dowdy sister in Sisters dealt with her prettier, child-laden sister who came to impose on her farm life.
Moments of subtle but sharp observations on relationships and Irish culture appear in stories like The Ginger Rogers Sermon, Men and Women, Quare Name for a Boy, Love in the Tall Grass, and The Burning Palms, that hint at where Keegan will develop her fiction later on down the line. The stories themselves though are uneven and more mundane than not.
Other stories like Burns, Ride If You Dare, A Scent of Winter, and Passport Soup come off like forced creative writing assignments where you don’t believe Keegan’s characters and the scenarios of awkward affairs or the breakdown of a marriage feel contrived and unconvincing.
More surprising were stories like Where the Water’s Deepest and Storms. I had Keegan down as a writer who, even at her least, was coherent in her storytelling, but these two stories are so vague and sketchy that I had no idea what they were about when I was reading them and even less after the fact!
As someone who really likes Claire Keegan’s work, Antarctica was a disappointing collection, full of barely-average, indistinct stories, few of which made any impression whatsoever. It’s easily my least favourite book of hers. For anyone interested in this author, I highly recommend her novels instead but if you want to read her better short fiction, I’d suggest Walk the Blue Fields over this one instead.
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