The Irish, perhaps due to a history of civil divide and holding onto staunch personal beliefs of what is right or wrong for the people of the Emerald Isle, are immensely good at producing guttural stories that are infused with a charming charisma and bitter edge. Today’s example is Small Things Like These, a rather acclaimed novella by Claire Keegan that has recently been adapted into a motion picture starring popular Irishman, Cillian Murphy.
Given the modest length of the novella, this review is quite spoiler heavy, more so than most other reviews here on The Steady Read. Please keep this in mind if you opt to read on!
With that aside, let’s examine Keegan’s story. At its core, Small Things Like These endeavours to explore a man’s dejectedness towards life, alongside his pressured morality, whilst tackling the hold that the Catholic Church had over Irish towns, such as that of New Ross, during the 1980s. In its push against the Church, Keegan gives particular focus to the abuse and mistreatment of young girls, often teenage mothers of bastard children that no one wants to be affiliated with, that are forced to carry out arduous labour through Magdalen laundry setups. A situation that, in reality, up to thirty thousand young Irish girls may have suffered through for years on end into the middle of the 1990s.
Moving discussion back to the fiction, Keegan’s vessel for this bleak narrative is the charming and decent, but simultaneously flawed and sympathetic, thirty-nine-year-old Bill Furlong. Existing as a hands-on manager and delivery driver of a firm selling home heating—coal, logs, gas, and the like—with a wife and five daughters to provide for, Keegan’s male lead immediately carves out an underdog position as overworked and drained, but is also gifted the patriarchal nobility of a family man that six females are looking up to and relying upon.
Bill is this novella’s star element, and the main reason it is worth reading, outside of its very grounded depiction of Ireland around Christmas of 1985. His strong, dependable position is contrasted against a childhood that, whilst upsetting, he concedes was better than what many worse-off children have suffered. Born without a father in the picture, and losing his young mother when he was twelve, Bill spent much of his childhood and formative years being raised by a farmhand called Ned and Mrs Wilson, a childless, Protestant widow that treated him like her own.
Keegan revolves much of Bill’s concerns and personality around this shaky upbringing, suggesting how deeply the events and nature of his childhood have affected him, with topics like Christmas and the thought of childish things, such as Santa, remaining touchy to him, in addition to a deep empathy for children that come from less than ideal homes. Moreover, his fractured parental situation drives him to be present and useful in his daughters’ lives; his respect for the stern but caring Mrs Wilson inspires him to ensure his daughters each receive good educations; and his origins of coming from nothing makes him hold the concept of family, home, and a sense of accomplishment dear to his silently troubled heart. As a character, he is convincingly conflicted and depressive, trying to wear a typically masculine face that shows little of his personal turmoil, which rarely works against his intuitive wife and her strong emotional instincts, much to his displeasure.
It becomes understandable that, with five growing girls who have an affiliation with the Church’s school and choir, Bill is unnerved when he catches glimpses of something being wrong at the local convent during various coal deliveries—girls begging to be let free, talking of how they want to drown themselves in the nearby river, high walls spiked with broken glass, nuns that seem weary of his presence, and one particular girl locked overnight in the convent’s coal shed. Upholding his characteristics, Keegan pushes her narrator to gradually resist against the religious figures abusing young females, ones that could have easily been his mother (had Mrs Wilson not taken her under her wing), or his daughters (had he done as his father had done, leaving a woman to bear children on her lonesome).
You would be amazed how often authors go against the nature of their characters, so it is relieving to see Keegan turn the cogs in her protagonist’s head so that he shifts from trying to stomach his wife’s mindset of, ‘it has little to do with us’, to his original and personally vested assertion that someone needs to do something to help the girls at the convent.
This represents a natural sense of development, where one weighs up righteousness against the sin of ignorance, and indulges in what they believe a true Christian would do, to defy oppressive authority for the sake of good. As readers, we can see how Bill’s conflict about intervening serves as an unspoken warning to the powers of institutionalism and herd mentality that stifle good nature for the sake of not bringing any trouble to one’s self. It is a question of how much can a person ignore without burdening their heart or mind, yet the author never directly spells this out, allowing us to grasp this naturally and without hand-holding.
Also, regarding this unnerving air around the Church, Keegan’s novella almost exists as both an anti- and pro-religious critique, suggesting that one can follow their morality without having to bow to those who supposedly represent their faith, and not submitting to a force that may not care all that much for its followers. I am certain I could analyse this further if time allowed, but the central thing to understand is that Keegan does a great job at grounding every beat and bit of logic within this ~128-page novella. Characters’ personal choices and conflicts feel organic and do not try to elevate the stakes or tension of the story, which is often the best way to formulate the standout and noteworthy parts of fiction, and treat the reader as emotionally mature and intelligent. Bad fiction forces artificial suspense and drama, which Keegan avoids in this publication.
Where her story did lose me a bit was right at the end, which pegged it down at least half a star for my overall rating. For all the love I can show towards Bill’s inner complexity—including his curiosity about what life would have been like had he married a different woman, and a decades-long interest in figuring out who his father is (an element that serves as a touching, tender sub-story)—Keegan failed to stick the landing in a satisfactory manner, undermining her protagonist and world building. Fumbling the conclusion is perhaps the gravest error of any author, so it upsets me that she could dodge all the typical pitfalls of fiction writing, only to stumble into the largest one of all, which I simply cannot discuss without spoiling the entire ending. If you want to avoid that, jump ahead to the final paragraph of this review.
After Bill executes a sombre act of defiance against the convent and its nuns, taking the girl from its coal shed under his care, he spends the final pages of the work circling on his awareness of the forthcoming trouble and the contradictory thrill of having done something good in his life, for once. This is not the issue, and, in fact, serves to deepen Bill’s character in the closing moments and offer him some true control over his life, rather than adhering to what doesn’t disturb the mediocrity of his tolerable, but not overly fulfilling, existence. Instead, the issue is that Keegan sets up a climax that doesn’t produce any sort of peak; it simply ends with no aftermath, not even a time skip, that gives an insight into how Bill’s actions affect him, his wife or daughters, or how they changed the abused girl’s life. Bill taking the girl is the beginning of the climax, realising the impact of his situation is the real suspenseful peak, but the pay-off is knowing what all this meant in the end, which never comes to fruition.
Whilst I can get behind leaving some things to the reader’s imagination, I think leaving so much unanswered in a shorter publication that already skimps on most characters’ backstory is simply too much of a narrative concession. Even a handful of pages set a year or two later in 1986 or 1987 that loosely explain some element of Bill’s life or how the family is doing could have better propped up the closing part of this otherwise fantastic story. The joy of writing in third-person is that you can jump to any character at any time, so why not use it?! Instead, we readers come away knowing nothing of what happens to seven central characters, and that feels plainly ridiculous after working up to the point where the protagonist goes against the grain and endangers all he holds dear for the sake of potentially unrewarding moral goodness.
This choice of vapid conclusion means that the ending is neither tonally happy or upsetting, but simply rendered unremarkable and grey, much like the Irish town it is set in. For a story that paced itself so slowly and deliberately, it desperately needed some thrill or rush to empower all that it worked for by reeling us into its little world and investing us in the nuanced, believable characters.
Naturally, my criticism of Keegan’s method of concluding her story is personal, and will not reflect the opinion of others who maybe find it a stroke of narrative genius or are happy to have their own say in what happens as a result of Bill’s actions. Perhaps you, the one reading this review, will also stand against me and have a stronger preference for open-ended works, where you can retrace the story for speculative hints on how things may go. I often like an element of openness to works as well, as it adds a lot of depth and personal attachment to a story on a per-reader basis, but that falters in this case. Regarding Small Things Like These, I think the author was simply too egregious with what was left unsaid, giving readers a rather binary self-made conclusion of things either working out well or ending badly for the family and rescued girl.
However, setting that blot aside, there is much to enjoy about Keegan’s novella. Her characters are both tangible and likeable; their relationships and interactions range from emotional to tense and thrilling in a subdued and domestic manner; and her ability to produce some environmentally bleak lines on a small Irish village being consumed by a cold winter point to an author that knows how to make an impact on her readers through visual imagery. For my gripes with it, this story is an engrossing read that serves as a fabulous way to while away a slow afternoon or evening. I recommend it, quite strongly at that, and not just because I’m an Irishman. It truly is worth your while, especially if you like grounded and slow-moving fiction.
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