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Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These [2021]
I was drinking my afternoon espresso at Chiave in one of the last dying days of August. I said hello to Ann, a bold Irish woman and a fellow avid reader. I’ve always had affection for Irish tall tales, poets, writers, rogues, and rebels. Perhaps this affection is ancestral; perhaps it is based on sentiment and sympathy. What are you reading? I asked Ann. “Claire Keegan.” I looked blank and Ann said, perhaps implying I should know, “Small Things Like These.” She was right. Earlier this week Keegan, along with five other writers, had been short-listed for the Booker Prize.
So, I picked up Keegan’s book. It’s a short novel, elegantly writ, sort of an Irish Christmas Carol. It takes place among the peoples who live close to the River Barrow, near the quays of Waterford. It starts in October and ends on Christmas Day. It’s 1985 and Ireland is going through a deep economic collapse. Bill Furlong, the moral ballast of the tale, is an honest collier who sells and delivers coal, bog, anthracite, and logs in the city, up and down the river, and into the countryside. Haunted by a past of childhood deprivation and ridicule, he has become a trusted pillar of the community. He has five beloved daughters and a good wife, Eileen. Although a man of few words, he’s a close observer of both the land and its people and he is thought by some to be generous to a fault.
The first half of the book presents a happy family idyll as Christmas approaches. The Furlongs make do in the growing economic crisis. The daughters are preparing for Christmas season, cooking, writing letters to Santa and the oldest girls, attend St. Margaret’s, a secondary school, and are rehearsing for the Christmas Carol pageant. St. Margaret happens to be adjoined to a Magdalen convent laundry. But there’s premonitions of what is to come as chapter four opens:
It was a December of crows. People had never seen the likes of them, gathering in black batches on the outskirts of town then coming in, walking the streets, cocking their heads and perching, impudently, on whatever lookout post that took their fancy, scavenging for what was dead, or diving in mischief for anything that looked edible along the roads before roosting at night in the huge old trees around the convent.
Thus, this marvelous tale unfolds between idyll and horror. We follow, through Furlong’s eyes and thoughts, his year-end rounds. He ponders: What does it mean to be alive? How do we do good in the world? How are we to separate -or can we? - the commonweal with our own self-interest? How does one reach out and do good? How does one fight evil? Is it worth the risk? This is an awesome and awful redemption tale based on historical events and crafted by one of Ireland’s premier wordsmiths.
For more on book and author see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umUMJE1JYjY&t=6s and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XazUcMzeTU
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