Antarctica

Antarctica by Claire Keegan

I am ashamed to admit that, despite being someone who enjoys reading short fiction and gravitates towards writing in that format, I had never heard of Claire Keegan until I was given one of her short fiction collections, Antarctica, for Christmas. It had been a while since I had read a short fiction collection, so I was really excited to start reading and made it a priority over the New Year period. I found many of these stories to be thought-provoking, with distinctive character voices and settings. As with most short fiction collections, there were some stories which I really enjoyed and others which were not for me, but even the ones that I did not personally enjoy in Antarctica still left me with an appreciation for Keegan’s writing.

One of the strengths evident throughout Antarctica is the way in which Keegan is able to engage the reader and draw them into the characters’ stories in the space of simply one scene. A great example of this is the story ‘Quare Name for a Boy’ which surprised me in being one of the ones that I remembered long after I had put the book down. It is one of the shorter stories in the collection and mostly revolves around one conversation in which the protagonist has returned to her home town to tell her one night stand that she is pregnant. It is an understated, quiet exploration of returning to the place you grew up in, feeling uncertainty over the future, and the space between what was expected and reality. In a similar vein, ‘Passport Soup’ is a quiet, shorter story which follows a couple whose daughter is missing through a week in their house. Through the briefest of interactions, Keegan clearly evokes how they are navigating each other’s grief, guilt, and anger, leading to an unsettling, sad, yet somehow hopeful confrontation.  

Broken family relationships feature prominently throughout the collection, from unhappy marriages, to complicated parent and child relationships, to disconnected siblings. I did not enjoy the stories which focused on infidelity and affairs, but there was a great deal of nuance in Keegan’s explorations of other familial relationships. One of the longer stories in the collection is ‘Sisters’, which follows Betty, living on her own in her childhood home, as she hosts her sister, Louisa, and her children. The deep resentment that Betty has towards Louisa, and the entitlement that Louisa feels towards Betty’s time, money, and energy, is clear from the beginning, yet still builds throughout the story, and all the more as Betty and the reader realise that Louisa is hiding the reality of her situation. However, whilst many of the stories in Antarctica could be seen as pessimistic as to the ability to ever move forward from a place of brokenness, there are others that include small glimmers of hope. ‘Burns’ is an example of this, following a father as he brings his children and second wife to a cabin which used to belong to his abusive first wife. Although they discover that there are some things which cannot be salvaged, Keegan makes it clear that this is a family who is working together to address and move forward in the midst of trauma.

Overall, this was a fascinating collection of short stories and I enjoyed taking my time reading through them. I particularly appreciated Keegan’s character writing and the conciseness with which she was able to evoke the nuances of the relationships depicted in the stories. I am intrigued to read more of Keegan’s writing in the future and will definitely be keeping my eye out for more of her collections. I would recommend Antarctica to those who enjoy short fiction but also to those who enjoy quiet and thoughtful literary fiction which focuses on broken characters and relationships.