JO KADLECEK reads Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These’, due to be released as a film in November…
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
Faber, 2022
ISBN-13: 978-0571368709
“Keegan’s novel is a parable on the costliness of compassion, a quality far more powerful and difficult than cruelty.”
Who wrestles with their conscience to do right these days?
Not many, it seems, if we believe the headlines. In fact, such wrestling is hardly sexy, let alone modelled. After all, we live in a world where bullying and belittling are too often the currency for “success”.
Which I find a bit depressing. And which is why when a friend loaned me Small Things Like These by revered Irish author Claire Keegan, I saw a splinter of light emerge on the landscape. It flickered again when I learned the film version (with Cillian Murphy of Oppenheimer fame) is set for release in November. Leave it to the art of fiction to offer a refreshing but gentle nudge toward correcting our cultural trajectory, inspiring us to wrestle well in caring first for others.
Set in a small Irish town in the 1980s, Small Things Like These follows Bill Furlong’s introspective days as he manages a coal yard. His humble vocation helps keep families warm in winter days, even when they cannot always pay him. Bill is also the father of five girls, and himself the recipient of kindness when a wealthy matron took him in as a boy after his mother died.
Such generosity and provision anchors Bill as he discovers the mistreatment of girls at a local Catholic convent where he delivers coal. Here, Keegan imagines the real horrors of one of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, where thousands of girls and women were concealed, incarcerated, abused and forced into labour.
When one girl begs Bill to take her home, the journey into his moral dilemma is set. And with Christmas soon to be celebrated, Bill finds Mass – and everything else – increasingly void of meaning, given the plight of the girls at the convent.
Finally, Bill confronts one of his few well-paying customers – the Mother Superior – about the girls’ neglect, and he is faced with a consequential choice. It is Keegan’s subtle but profound prose around Bill’s quandary that brings us light: “As they carried on along and met more and 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?…Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing?”
The challenge, of course, is for all of us. Keegan’s novel is a parable on the costliness of compassion, a quality far more powerful and difficult than cruelty.
Bill’s questions challenge each of us to ask the same, calling us back to the highest most rewarding road possible, that of loving our neighbours. Yes, “Some part of him, whatever it could be called – was there any name for it? – was going wild, he knew. The fact was that he would pay for it, but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this.”
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Correction: The book’s title has been corrected in the text.