It’s 1985 and the Roman Catholic church still has a hold over daily life in small towns like New Ross in the southeast of Ireland. Bill Furlong, who has a modest business providing coal and other combustibles for heat, finds himself in demand as Christmas approaches and the weather turns cold. Against all expectation, Bill Furlong has made a place for himself in the community, married, with five daughters, and a respectable business that keeps others employed. I say “against all expectation” because Bill was born to an unwed mother and his life could easily have taken a different turn. However, his mother’s employer, a Protestant woman named Mrs. Wilson, kept her on as a domestic, even after she had given birth to Bill, and allowed the two of them to live under her roof with some measure of stability despite their circumstances. Mrs. Wilson could make this gesture because, as a Protestant with a pension, she stood beyond the reach of local mores.
Bill, however, does not enjoy that luxury. He is thoroughly embedded within the community. Whether through music lessons or the school or through church involvement, each of his daughter’s has some tie to the local convent. Bill himself has a contract to supply coal, and on a delivery, he goes around the back to the coal shed where he finds a young girl locked inside, shivering and standing in her own feces. Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to think the worst, Bill assumes this must be the result of an oversight. He takes the girl around to the front door where the sisters make light of it; the silly thing was playing hide and seek and got herself locked in the shed; they’d wondered where she went. They invite Bill in for tea, inquire after his family, wish him all the best of the season, and send him home with an envelope, ostensibly a tip, possibly a bribe. We aren’t sure.
Bill is wracked. The circumstance don’t line up. A girl playing hide and seek wouldn’t be locked in a shed long enough to litter the ground with feces. And there is the question of her baby. She asked Bill what had happened to it. On one side of it, Bill is troubled by his own history. His mother could easily have stood where he found that girl, working in the convent laundry, stripped of her own infant son, effectively a slave. On the other side of it, his wife Eileen urges him not to get involved because the consequences will affect not just him, but her and the girls, too. The convent holds too much power in the community, and if Bill goes too far, ostracism is a certainty.
Claire Keegan has written her novella with a jewel-like precision. It is a rare thing of beauty. And the world has recognized it as such. It has the distinction of being the shortest work ever to be nominated for the Booker Prize and we shall see how it does when the winner is announced on October 17th, 2022. You can read it in a couple hours, less if you don’t pause to savour it.
Three observations:
First, although I’ve heard people describe Claire Keegan’s prose as compressed, I don’t think that’s really the case. We shouldn’t confuse the work’s length with the writing itself, which sometimes has a luxuriant quality to it. To illustrate, here is a sentence I love from the novella’s opening paragraph:
In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.
If there is anything in her writing approaching compression, it’s in the way she presents her characters, which have about them a quality that reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s caves. There are hollowed out spaces behind each of her characters. We have no access to these spaces, but their (negative) presence suggests depth beyond the page. And so, despite brevity, there is no caricature. Only fully embodied people who are neither good nor evil, but complicated.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that good and evil have no play in this novella. Instead, it concerns itself with freedom. Or at least moral freedom, which may be the only kind of freedom there is: the freedom to stand outside the moral constraints of your community. Mrs. Wilson had such freedom, but it was easier for her because religion and financial means already set her outside the moral constraints of her community. Bill Furlong faces a greater challenge. If he chooses to act freely, his choice will come with great cost.
Second (and related to the notion of caves), I hear echoes in the writing. Most obviously, I hear an echo of James Joyce’s The Dead. I’m not sure exactly why I hear this, apart from the fact that it’s an Irish story and set at Christmas. Perhaps it’s that both works evoke what has gone missing and what could have been if fate’s dial had been turned by just a quarter of a degree.
The novella also calls to mind a short piece by Virginia Woolf titled “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in which she uses the need for a pencil as the pretext to go out on a winter’s evening and playing the voyeur, observing people in their places of business or in their homes and imagining what their lives must be like. In the same way, Bill Furlong walks through the town, puzzling out his conundrum:
When he reached the far bank of the river, he walked on, up the hill, passing other types of houses with lighted candles and handsome, red poinsettias in the front rooms, houses he’d never before looked into, only from outside the back door. In one, a young boy, wearing a blazer, was seated at a piano while a beautifully dressed woman, holding a long-stemmed glass, stood at his side, listening. In another…
It’s not quite the same as Virginia Woolf’s wanderings. Here, we don’t know what Bill Furlong thinks as he observes people in their homes. He provides the eyes, and we do the imagining for him. Maybe we are meant to ask how it is that all these good people of New Ross, who patronize the convent laundry, and send their children to its school, and to sing in its choir, can nevertheless suffer such a failure of imagination.
Finally, I am reminded of a character in Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars, Bridie Sweeney. The novel is set in a Dublin hospital during the Spanish Flu. Bridie Sweeney is a teen-aged girl from the local orphanage assigned to help a nurse in the maternity ward. As in Small Things Like These, nuns assert administrative control over every aspect of life and it is implied that Bridie has suffered abuse under their care.
No doubt you will hear your own literary echoes as you read this novella.
My third observation is that some echoes are more than simply literary. Although Claire Keegan uses life in the southeast of Ireland as the context for her story, the abuses of the Magdalene laundries have their parallels elsewhere in the world. Recently, in Canada, the abuses of residential schools have dominated the news cycles. Although most Canadians have been vaguely aware for years of such abuses, it has been easy to sweep them under the political carpet because those crying out for justice have little power. It isn’t until people arrived with ground penetrating radar and identified actual bodies and, where possible, gave them names, that people sat up and took notice. Even then, it’s difficult to sustain outrage in a world where the media seem incapable of making a moral distinction between the hand-print on Chris Rock’s face and the deliberate systematic neglect of thousands of indigenous children.
Finally, I add only this: I suspect in time that Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These will come to be recognized as one of this century’s masterpieces.