I often rue the turning of the final page of a novel, but in this case, the end came long before I was ready to accept it. At just 114 pages of good-sized print, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is just a novella yet its impact is larger than many novels four times its length.
I was not familiar with Keegan’s work at all before I read this Booker Prize 2022 winner. Now I’m on a mission to read as much of her writing as I can get my hands on.
Synopsis of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
S et in the small town of New Ross in southern Ireland in 1985, Bill Furlong, the coal and timber merchant, is a gentle man who works tirelessly to look after his wife, Eileen, and their five daughters, to keep the community warm through another bitter cold winter, and to provide an income for his small workforce. Blessed with a loving wife and five smart, well-behaved girls, Bill is grateful for all the small things he has that others do not.
Like everywhere else in the Republic, times are hard in New Ross. Dole queues are getting longer; the shipyard has closed, many factories are making redundancies, and the young are leaving to emigrate to England and to the United States. Bill is determined to keep his small operation going and to keep his girls at St Margaret’s school.
One day, Bill went up to the convent which adjoined St Margaret’s school on the hill on the far side of the river. Run by the Good Shepherd nuns, the convent was both a training school for girls and a laundry. Rumours about the convent were rife:
“Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of dirty linen, that worked from dawn til night. The local nurse had told that she’d been called out to treat a fifteen-year-old with varicose veins from standing so long at the wash tubs…
…Others swore the place was no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth, saying it was their own people who had put them in there after their illegitimates had been adopted out to rich Americans, or sent off to Australia, that the nuns got good money by placing these babies out to foreign, that it was an industry they had going.”
As he was early, Bill went around to the back of the building to see if he could find anyone to take the delivery and stumbled across an orchard and a chapel where he found a dozen young women and girls on their hands and knees “polishing their hearts out in circles on the floor.” Dressed in rags and wearing no shoes, one girl who looked like her hair had been cut with shears by a blind person, came up to him and pleaded with him to let her out of the gate so she could get to the river and drown herself. When a stern nun arrived, the girl dropped back to her knees to continue her task.
Shaken by the encounter, as he drove away, Bill reflected on the high walls, the padlocked doors, and the secretive behaviour of the nun who had escorted him out of the chapel. Later that night, when he recounted his experience to Eileen, she grew angry and told him not to interfere and that no good could come of it. Unused to any kind of conflict between them, Bill was taken aback by her attitude, reflecting on his own beginning in life and of what may have happened to him had not a kind benefactor taken him under her wing.
When he returns to the convent to deliver coal early on Christmas morning, he makes another discovery and this time, he cannot ignore it. After that, nothing is the same for Bill. We share his train of thoughts as he tries to reconcile his family’s and the community’s relationship with the convent and the church, with his heart and his conscience.
My review
T he theme of the mother and baby homes of the Magdalen laundry which flourished in the Republic of Ireland right up until the 1990s, is a familiar one. Yet Claire Keegan finds a way to present the issue in a different, very personal way.
Approaching from the point of view of a man whose unmarried mother, had a wealthy widow not seen fit to give one of her staff a chance in life, could have ended up in a convent laundry, she shines a light not just on the power of the Church but also on the complicit secrecy of small communities.
Rumours about the convent were well known in New Ross yet no-one said or did anything to challenge what was going on there. As the Mother Superior held the power of veto over entry to St Margaret’s, the only good girls’ school in the district, not to mention over the grades of those already in the school, Eileen knew better than to challenge her and was angry that Bill should even contemplate such a thing. Tradespeople would hear nothing against the convent as it was one of the few places that paid its bills on time and gave generous tips, and churchgoers feared for their mortal soul if they were to question God’s servants. Everyone had more to lose than to gain by rocking that particular boat.
A mild, generous and thoughtful man, and a loving husband and father, Bill has a moral dilemma to deal with; keeping all the small things that make his life better than others or speaking out against a heinous injustice. Always quick to help those who are less fortunate than himself, he is like the conscience of the community and has to decide whether to risk everything by defying the Mother Superior, or whether to do as Eileen bids him and keep his peace.
Ultimately, Small Things Like These is a story of the triumph of love, and despite its bleak subject matter, leaves you filled with hope.
Above and beyond the subject matter and the compelling way in which the story is narrated, Claire Keegan’s writing has a hypnotic and rhythmic poetry about it. Her descriptions of Ireland seem so simple yet capture the very essence of its nature:
“In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before disappearing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.”
It’s enough to have you pulling your sleeves down hard, tucking your knees under you, and snuggling into the chair while you read.
