This year Claire Keegan, long esteemed, became fêted. Small Things like These has just won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and been longlisted for the Booker. Foster, published in 2010, has been filmed as The Quiet Girl. I shall not see it, at least not for a while; the words on the page are lodged in my head. Keegan’s fiction makes most novels look too fancy; her short ...
Like all Claire Keegan’s books, it slips down easily, weaving a character’s idiom – ‘he could not say which he rathered’ – in and out of the narrative. It doesn’t argue, it pulses: with observation, memory, anticipation, anxiety, hope. It is, nonetheless, an attack: on institutions, social organisation, systemic injustice and the arrangements of the Catholic Church. At the centre – though they begin at the periphery – are the Magdalene Laundries.