Small Things Like These
The diminutive book, Small Things Like These (2021), by Irish author Claire Keegan, with its cover in green and white, tells the powerful Christmas-time story of middle-aged Irishman living a simple life in his quiet Irish village. For coalman, Bill Furlong, Christmas that year (1985) was a nostalgic one. He, his wife, and their many daughters go about preparing for the holidays much the way their neighbors do, yet an existential longing, a nameless questioning works at him. In the days leading up to Christmas, he delivers coal to village convent where he faces a shocking situation that brings past and present truths into the light of his life. The episode, fraught with uncomfortably strained moments in the company of the nuns, ends when he commits to further help, if such help be needed. Rather than engage in the collective silence at large in the village, Bill chooses kindness and courage.
Small Things Like These provides the reader with a view into Bill’s interior life. In fact, much of the novel’s writing focuses exclusively on his inner thoughts, memories, hopes, and fears. He, the reader discovers early on, is a bastard son of a young woman who worked for a wealthy, local Protestant widow. She never shunned his mother, or him for that matter, and he was raised surrounded by love and relative comfort. His experience, of course, greatly foils with the whispered experiences of the unfortunate girls who find themselves at the mercy of the Sisters and the double-sided sword of their sanctuary.
Keegan’s novel is breathtaking in its succinctness and the intimacy of human experience it reflects. It is a quintessential Irish tale that bears witness to the brutal conditions of the Magdalene Laundries sprinkled across the country, even as late as the 1980s. Small Things Like These begs the reader stop and ponder the small acts of kindness and courage any ordinary villager might make, and the ripple effect such small, albeit bold actions, may create. Of course, it also reflects the collective turning a blind eye among otherwise caring villagers that enabled the torturous conditions of the Magdalene Laundries.
If you are looking for a book to transport you to the Emerald Isle, that contemplates one difficult aspect of Ireland’s tortured past, Small Things Like These will certainly satisfy. If you enjoy writing that dives into the interior lives of one character, exploring emotional and psychological complexity of everyday folk, I encourage you to find a copy of Keegan’s novel.
Bibliography:
Keegan, Claire. Small Things Like These. Grove Press: 2021.
A Few Great Passages:
“Before long, he caught hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come” (28).
“[H]e found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brace enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?” (112-113).
“How light and tall he almost felt walking along with this girl at his side and some fresh, new, unrecognizable joy in his heart. Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing? Some part of him, whatever it could be called – was there any name for it? – was going wild, he knew. The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy obstinate cries” (113).
