Small Things Like These

You will be tempted to treat Claire Keegan's beautiful novella as something to race through in a single sitting; it's only 70 (Kindle) pages long, seemingly perfect for an hour spent waiting for your license renewal at the DMV. But if you read this book for the plot alone you'd be missing the best part of this book: the glorious language, which makes virtually every sentence a poem. I found myself frequently rereading a sentence or a paragraph to enjoy again Keegan's use of language.

Which isn't to say that there isn't a plot. It's 1985, and Bill Furlong is a married man with a loving wife and five daughters, a Catholic in a Catholic town in a Catholic country, Ireland. He lives not far from a convent of intimidating nuns who run a show more school his two eldest daughters attend, the best school around and the one most likely to ensure his daughters can reach their potential. But the convent also runs a "training school," about which much is whispered and not much is known except that the training school runs a laundry that produces beautifully washing clothing and linens, looking like new.

Christmas is approaching and Bill, who runs a coal and wood business, is extraordinarily busy in the very cold weather that has set in. When he delivers to the convent, he discovers a teenage girl in the nuns' coal shed. She is desperate to get away, and the why of that desperation, and the effect it has on Bill, is what fuels this tale.

I read this novel yesterday, Christmas Day 2024, and it was perfect for the day. It gave me much to think about, both in terms of craft and in terms of what we owe one another in this world. I recommend it highly. show less

A shameful episode from Irish history receives searing treatment in Claire Keegan’s brief but powerful novel, Small Things Like These. In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1985, successful coal merchant William Furlong is gripped by a strange and unaccustomed malaise. The feeling is strong but mysterious because Bill should be content with his life. Approaching middle age, he has established himself as a respected member of the community in the rural village of New Ross. Furlong is financially secure and married to Eileen. They have five young daughters. By all accounts the Furlong household is a happy one. But Bill’s personal history has left him with questions. In 1946, at sixteen, his mother became pregnant. The girl, rejected by show more her own family, was kept on as a live-in maid by kindly Mrs. Wilson, a Protestant widow who, with no children of her own, assumed a central role in Bill’s education and upbringing, especially following the sudden death of Bill’s mother when he was only twelve. Bill never learned who his father was and throughout his youth lived with the stigma of being born out of wedlock. For his entire life, the mystery of his father’s identity has weighed upon his mind, but more so recently because he expects that very soon his daughters will have questions of their own regarding their grandfather. As part of his delivery route Bill visits a local convent, which also runs a girls’ school and laundry business. Here he inadvertently makes a troubling discovery. He does what he believes is right to rectify an uncomfortable situation. But when he collects his payment from the mother superior, her chilly response to what he thought was a simple act of kindness makes it clear to him that he should keep what he’s witnessed and any questions to himself. These days the history of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries (also called asylums) is well known. It was a network of church-run institutions operated almost as prisons, in which “fallen women” and girls whose families had disowned them or were otherwise without support or resources were incarcerated and kept in a state of slavery. In Keegan’s story Bill does not fully comprehend the implications of what he has seen, only that the terror he witnessed is real. It makes him want to act, which he later does, despite the risk of perilous consequences. Keegan implies that because the church was such a powerful and omnipotent presence in the community, for close to 200 years people turned a blind eye to the suffering taking place almost on their doorsteps. The archaic rhythms of Keegan’s prose are lulling, but don’t be fooled. The book’s message is devastating. show less

It would be hard to overstate how exquisitely written this profoundly affecting novella is. There is a gentle rhythm to Clare Keegan’s spare, elegant prose which was apparent from the start and which I found almost hypnotic in the way it immediately drew me into the story. The nuanced detail which underpinned her portrayal of Bill as an honest, hardworking and compassionate man, a person with a deeply-rooted moral code who wanted to do his best not only for his family but also for those in less fortunate circumstances, was truly exceptional. I very quickly started to feel that I was party to his innermost thoughts as he reflected on his past: never unappreciative, given the circumstances of his birth, of how fortunate he’d been and show more yet still troubled by some aspects of it, especially the fact that he didn’t know who his father was. His inner restlessness and his determination to do what was morally right, whatever the personal cost, were so brilliantly evoked that there were moments when I felt I wanted to protect him from the dilemmas he was struggling with.
Although Bill was the most comprehensively developed character, I was impressed by how the author managed to portray all her characters in such a vivid, immediately recognisable way – each one seemed to leap from the page. Equally convincing were her descriptions of the landscape and her portrayal of a community controlled by the power of the Catholic Church, with people fearful of challenging the status quo, and feeling disturbed by anyone who dared to. Weaving through the darker and more thought-provoking aspects of the author’s storytelling are some delightful, tender vignettes of everyday life in the Furlong family and interactions between the parents and their daughters, particularly as they make preparations for Christmas. Her description of how making the cake was a joint effort, with each member of the family contributing something to the preparations, was so precisely detailed that I could almost the smell the ingredients and feel the warmth of the kitchen.
In this novella’s one hundred-and ten-pages Clare Keegan’s use of rich, lyrical and economical prose provides a masterclass in demonstrating how less really can feel like more when each well-chosen word and sentence in the narrative contributes to the developing story. I can think of many full-length novels which fall far short of the
psychological depth which is integral to this truly unforgettable story. It is one which explores the best and the worst of human behaviour but, as Bill Furlong reminds us, we are all capable of choosing to do the morally right thing. show less

Now I need a good cry.

This small novel is quiet and soft-spoken, like the protagonist Furlong himself. A beautiful, powerful work about a not beautiful time in Irish history, a history that lasted up until nearly the end of the 20th century, now exposed for what it really was.

Actually, it wasn't exclusively part of Ireland's history. My mother, now deceased, was sent to a "girls home" and orphanage in New Mexico, run by Good Shepherd nuns. She was just 12 and was sent there by my grandmother to keep her out of trouble. I suspect the trouble was her step-father. Her older sister, also a young teen, had just taken a job as a live-in babysitter for another family. Interesting.

My mother hated her time there, 200 miles from home, and hated show more the nuns who ran it. They were not kind and not good shepherds. Mom said she was hungry most of the time and would volunteer for washing pots and pans just to scrape a little more food from them. The meager food they were served was sometimes cabbage or potatoes, but mostly beans, and often the beans would be reheated until they began to go sour but still served to the children. The nuns straight away taught her to embroider. The nuns sold the girls' best embroidered handkerchiefs all over the world where they are now on display in museums. They also had a laundry. I guess my mother was spared that terrible labor being so young. But, truth is, there is much I don't know for certain because she seldom talked about that time.

Finally she was able to return home for a visit, when that older sister was killed in a tragic car crash, for her funeral. Before she could be shipped back to the girls home, she met the brother-in-law of a friend, a handsome 19 year old, and married him at just 14. She had escaped the girls home, and home home.

Many years later, in her late 50s, my mom made a solo pilgrimage to Los Cruses and had a long cry at, or maybe near, the original school site. Imagine. After all those years, she still had tears and trauma.

I would like to lay down some harsh words about the hidden histories of the Catholic Church but we all know the horrors too well now. Not a continent has been spared the trauma, not even a small New Mexico town, so proud of their "Good Shepherd" nuns. Reading Keegan's book, I've had my cry too, for my mom. She suffered life-long depression and while I was growing up she made several suicide attempts with subsequent hospitalizations that lasted months. I've carried those experiences also, all my life. I'm not laying this generational trauma all at the feet of the Catholic Church but clearly they knew they were not offering enlightened Christ-like love to my mother or any of the children there. How could they not know?

We all need a good cry. I hope Small Things Like These helps bring out cathartic tears for and by countless Irish, the Irish who suffered perhaps most under the many interlocked tyrannies of Church and State. show less

Small Things Like These is a tolerable, well-written short novella, but it is nevertheless hard to shake the feeling that author Claire Keegan has mishandled her topic. Not mishandled it badly, for the book does move the reader slightly, but the topic of the depraved, abuse-riddled 'Magdalene laundries' which existed in Ireland until the 1990s has much more to it than Keegan delivers – and deserved something more substantial.

Her short novella is told from the perspective of an unassuming man who encounters an abused young girl at one of these convents, and then must wrestle with his conscience as he encounters implicit social pressure to forget what he has seen. Keegan traces this rather well, in a subtle, understated way that is show more rather effective, and also draws analogues to the man's own struggles to be recognised and accepted by his community.

Nevertheless, one is left with a slightly bitter taste when the book's end quickly arrives (it can be read in a single sitting). We are left with no knowledge or insight into what the Magdalene laundries were, and the dynamics between the abuses there and the complicity of the wider society is barely even hinted at, let alone explored. The topic demanded a full novel, unpacking the story and leaving the society uncomfortable and the perpetrators skewered and with nowhere to hide. Instead Keegan provides a misdirected fancy, a sketch rather than a story, that turns this massive, multi-generational suffering into a slight – and slightly twee – Christmas fable that keeps the victims hidden and unheard, its perpetrators unnamed and in the shadows, while seeking to absolve Irish society for its long complicity by giving them a rough Atticus Finch copy who does in the story what they did not do in reality.

The book relies on a reader's foreknowledge of the controversy (which no one outside of Ireland will have) and records none for posterity. And with its story of a quietly courageous citizen speaking up, it provides a comforting fiction for Irish society to draw a line under the atrocities while keeping them at a safe, sanitised distance. It is a book insubstantial enough that it will be forgotten in time, but with its false narrative catharsis and absolution having performed the sin of short-circuiting a true cultural reckoning in favour of its own few underwhelming sparks. show less

This slim volume follows a hard working lumber and coal distributor as he juggles the demands of his business, his family (wife and 5 girls), and his conscience. He's a middle aged father, wondering what a different life might have been like, and then he is confronted with knowledge of things happening in his community that he'd rather not know about. Told in very simple language, it is nevertheless evocative of nuanced emotion. It is not a story about triumph over the evil in the world (though there is a little of that), but rather it is a story of reconciling oneself to one's moral integrity.

Small Things Like These - Keegan
4 stars

This is a heart warming novella, easily mistaken for a Hallmark Christmas story. It isn’t. It is an intense character study of Bill Furlong, dedicated family man and coal merchant during the weeks leading to Christmas in 1985. A short story about a good man striving to run a business and support his family would seem unlikely to have a strong feminist theme. But, this story is very concerned with the historical treatment of young women in a small, church controlled, Irish town. Bill Furlong had a mother. He has daughters. He also has a conscience.

It’s a short story, very understated. It made me want to read more of Keegan’s writing.