Very occasionally my reading group makes a book-scheduling boo-boo, and it happened this year when we chose Irish writer Claire Keegan’s So late in the day: Stories of women and men for our May read. This book, which comprises three of Keegan’s short stories, “So late in the day”, “The long and and painful death”, and “Antarctica”, looked like a great introduction to Keegan, but locating it proved a challenge. There is no e-version, and the printed version seemed not to be in stock at Australian booksellers. So, given the titular story (which I’ve reviewed) was available, we decided to read that, and let those interested choose their own value-adds.

I chose to read “Antarctica”, from the eponymous short story collection already on my TBR, and the historical fiction novella, Small things like these. I will post on the short story collection later, so this post is devoted to the novella, which most of you have already read. I had seen the movie, which was excellent, but wanted to read the original.

Small things like these is set in the small Irish town of New Ross in 1985, over the weeks leading up to Christmas. The place is important. It is a real, historic port town which, significantly, housed one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. And the date is important because, socioeconomically, 1980s Ireland was a bleak time. Redundancies were increasing – “the dole queues were getting longer” – and people struggled to pay their bills. It’s the sort of time, in other words, when pragmatism and morality are most likely to come into conflict. It’s telling that, besides being shortlisted for awards like the Booker Prize, this book won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

“things you have to ignore”

The novel’s protagonist, Bill Furlong, is a “coal and timber merchant” and the father of five daughters. A little over halfway through the novel, while delivering coal to the local convent, he discovers a young girl locked in the coalshed. What happens next forces him to confront who he is.

Here is Keegan’s description of Furlong at the end of chapter 2:

The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down to stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls and see them getting and completing their education at St Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in the town.

What I particularly love about Keegan’s writing is the slow way she releases information, which challenges us to read between the lines and not jump to simplistic responses (or, to reconsider those responses as we read a little further). She uses simple straight-forward sounding sentences and plain words that carry huge weight. So, in this sentence we learn that Furlong knows times are tough, that he wants to give “his girls” the best start he can, but that to do this he needs to “keep his head down to stay on the right side of people”. Now what does that mean? By chapter 5, in which he discovers the young girl, we are getting an inkling.

In the preceding four chapters, Keegan has gradually built a picture of who Furlong is. In chapter 2, we learn his origins. He was born in 1946 to a teen mother, who was a domestic servant at the time. Her family rejected her, but her widowed Protestant employer, Mrs Wilson, not only kept her on, but provided a nurturing environment for the boy. Furlong, in other words, was one of the lucky ones. In his turn, he passes on little kindnesses when he can. This doesn’t thrill his wife, Eileen. She’s a good mother, but she inclines more to the charity-begins-at-home philosophy, and questions helping those who “bring the hardship on themselves”. By chapter 3, Furlong, who is about to turn 40, is questioning what it’s all for, “the work and the constant worry … he had begun to wonder what mattered”.

So, the scene is set. We have a decent man, whose life could very well have gone a very different way but for the kindness of an unrelated woman. Instead, he’s an established family man with his own business. He’s not wealthy, and he understands life’s precarity – “it would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything” – but right now, with hard work and care, he can provide for his family. However, he’s a sensitive man and questions keep popping up.

Chapter 4 opens with an image of crows “gathering in black batches … perching, impudently … scavenging for what was dead … before roosting at night in the huge old trees around the convent”. The next paragraph describes the convent, “a powerful-looking place … with black, wide-open gates”. They might be invitingly wide-open, and the convent might “look like a Christmas card” but the opening image of the crows, the wide-open gates being black, and the rumours that circulate about the “training school” run by the Good Shepherd nuns, suggest darker possibilities. Furlong doesn’t like to believe the rumours but on a pre-Christmas visit to the convent he accidentally comes across some young “trainees” whose desperate appearance and manner deeply unsettle him. From here on, he finds it hard to forget what he knows to be true, though his wife urges him to do so:

“If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on”.

A little later, pub-owner Mrs Kehoe is more explicit, warning him that “these nuns have a finger in every pie”, and crossing them could have serious consequences for his family and livelihood. But, for Furlong, the questions won’t go away:

… 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?

It would be a spoiler to tell you what he does, but Small things like these is a quietly powerful story about a man confronting himself – who he is, and who he wants to be – in the face of what he knows is cruelty and injustice, while living in a community that is complicitly silent about what it knows. That this is Christmas and takes place in a Christian community adds to the novel’s power and import, as does the epigraph from “The Proclamation of the Irish Republic” which declares, among other things, that it will cherish “all of the children of the nation equally”.

Small things like these has what I love best in my reading – a story which grabs my heart and speaks to my mind, a generosity towards its characters, and tight evocative writing. It’s a deeply moral book about how we choose to live, about being brave when you know what the right thing to do is but there’s a good chance you’ll pay for it. You could say that this is a book for now, but in fact it is a book for all time.

Claire Keegan
Small things like these
London: Faber & Faber, 2022 (Orig. ed. 2021)
116pp.
ISBN: 9780571368709