Claire Keegan's 'Small Things Like These' is a powerful novel of 110-pages, about to be stretched into a movie adaptation starring Cillian Murphy.
I got this book for myself in lockdown - some time in 2021 - but didn't crack it open until today, to help pull myself out of a reading slump and concentration-shortage. Keegan helped me on both fronts; but she also sharpened my senses reading this one, giving me a bone-deep pleasure that comes from a perfect book that nuzzles itself into your side, at just the right time.
Ostensibly this is the story of an Irish coalman in his early 40s in 1985, as Christmas day approaches and he catches himself pondering deep thoughts and idly imagining a different life for himself ... amidst memories of his long-dead teenage mother, his unknown father, and the world of men that await his five young daughters.
Whilst this is happening, he goes to the Convent on three separate occasions to deliver coal, and encounters "fallen women" - girls - who beg him for escape. His wife warns him to stay on the right side of people, and a local businesswoman reminds him that "they" - the Church - have a hand in everything.
And yet. Furlong keeps thinking about them, and his own life - how different it would have been, had his mother ended up in a place like that with him, or without.
As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he 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 brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
This is Keegan writing about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, and the long arm of Roman Catholic orders ... though; for all of Furlong's deepening thoughts about the point and purpose of life, and what it takes to be a good person, you can read many a substitute in Keegan's novel, for the abuse of women.
Keegan's is at once a scathing critique of the vast network of church-and-state institutions that perpetuated violence and brutality in Ireland, and even without going into the mechanics, she makes clear how the Catholic church kept a colonial hand in Ireland's formation. But this story is also a meditation on what we do with our time; how we spend a life.
Before long, he caught a 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.
Furlong is contrasted against his wife; a woman who grew up with both her parents and wants to keep a similar order in her own world now, and for their own five girls in the future. Furlong's musings about what goes on at the convent, and the girls he has encountered there, turn her into a Lady Macbeth-type, bemoaning a damned spot of thought.
'Where does thinking get us?' she said. 'All thinking does is bring you down.' She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. 'If you want to get on in life, there's things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.'
That Furlong is a colaman conjures the Dickensian character of Ebenezer Scrooge, who permits his clerk - Bob Cratchit - one coal for a fire. Furlong's persistent memories too, of a childhood raised in a stately home where his teenage mother was servant but also permitted to raise her child out of wedlock, have a touch of the 1946 classic 'It's a Wonderful Life' for how George Bailey looks backwards and forwards on his life and all its turning points. Nothing Keegan does is by accident; her sentences are sharp, the thoughts cutting, and her decision to set this as a Christmas tale is especially clever ... after all; what better time of year to contemplate the good and bad of people, to reach for our higher-selves?
This novel was extraordinary. Keegan does more with a mere 110-pages than some authors will in their lifetime, and you cannot help but feel you are in the presence of greatness with every page-turn.
5/5
