Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan’s short novel, Small Things Like These, is a fictional take on very real events in Ireland that gives those events more close, personal attention than a reader would get from journalism alone. It’s about a once-orphaned Catholic Irishman named Bill Furlong who has made a proper life for himself with a coal business he founded. He is married with five daughters of his own. Making a coal delivery one day to a local convent of nuns, the school of which his own daughters attend, he discovers that the convent also runs a home for girls born out of wedlock or who have had children of their own born illegitimately. These girls are hidden away, to work within the convent’s laundry business. No pay. Very bad conditions.
In one memorable passage among many, Furlong meets Sarah, a teenage girl working in the laundry who was sent there pregnant and unmarried. She gives birth to the child in the laundry, who is then taken away from Sarah immediately after the baby’s arrival, never to be seen again. Furlong comes to understand what happened to the now-sorrowing girl when he notices the milk from her breasts blotching the front of the uniform dress she is wearing.
The actual Magdalene convent laundry business, once endemic to Ireland and totally secretive, is now famous, having been exposed in the years prior to 2013, when…finally…the Irish government issued a formal state apology. The government had as much to explain as had the Order of Magdalene Sisters when their treatment of the girls was discovered. The Magdalenes have never formally acknowledged their policies for the laundries or for their treatment of the laundry girls over the two hundred years that the laundries existed.
Bill Furlong leads a reasonably dull life, yet is a truly remarkable character, given his own questionable childhood and the enormous emotional price he pays once he discovers the girls in the laundry and the fate from which they suffer. His shock and the bravery he exhibits rescuing Sarah herself from the laundry make for remarkable fiction. Bill realizes toward the end of the novel what serious trouble his “abduction” of Sarah will cause him. This includes what may happen when he introduces Sarah to his wife and daughters. But the fact that he does abduct her, and his reasoning for doing so, despite the illegality of his action, make Bill Furlong into a courageous hero.
I cannot recommend this book more highly.
And for me, there are remarkable descriptions in this novel of Bill’s life as an Irish Roman Catholic. The descriptions of Catholic Church services and the clerics themselves (from what I saw as a child and as a years-long altar boy in 1950s Oakland, California) are right on the mark. (Note: The novel takes place in the 1980s.) So much has changed in The Church (maybe), but Keegan’s descriptions of it in those times and its ceremonies simply ring true for me. Moralistic, careless, dismissive cruelty.
Personal note: I was never once approached by any priest or other religious worker who may have had sexual abuse in mind. There were other, if you will, “misdemeanors” from priests and nuns alike, but those had to do with their irreligious disregard of and disrespect for children. They were cruel events, yes…small, clueless, and frequent, but nothing like those represented by child molestation or in Small Things Like These.
Cillian Murphy has made a film of Small Things Like These, in which he plays Bill Furlong. I can hardly wait to see it.
Another personal note, if you would like to see a short story of mine that is based to some degree on my own childhood experience of The Church and its teachings, please see “Little Bridget and The Flames of Hell.” The character Little Bridget, a ten-year-old, suffers terribly, but in the end is redeemed by “her father’s mortal tears.”
© 2024 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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