Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan

Faber, £10

Review By Dani Garavelli

Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These is perfectly titled: all its power lies in its understatement; all its heft in its apparent weightlessness.

“A lot of my work goes into taking any traces of my labours out,” the Irish author said after the publication of her much-lauded short story Foster, about a girl sent to live on a farm while her mother gives birth, back in 2010. Now, in 110 deceptively effortless pages, she takes the national scandal of the Magdalene laundries and tells it so quietly you scarcely want to breathe. It is the quietness of the telling that makes the cruelty so stark; the ordinariness of the community she portrays that makes its complicity so hard to bear.

At the centre of Small Things Like These is Bill Furlong, whose moral core was smelted at the foundry of someone else’s compassion. When his unmarried mother – the Catholic maid to a Protestant widow – fell pregnant with him, her family cast her out. But her employer kept her on. She allowed Bill to sleep in a Moses basket as his mother worked, nurtured him as he grew and gave him some money to kick-start his life.

Furlong has made good on her investment. He has his own coal and timber business, a raven-haired wife, Eileen, and five raven-haired daughters. Yet he is troubled: by the memory of his own childhood, and his inability to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.

Keegan is the goddess of small things. Her ability to conjure whole worlds from a few words; an entire relationship from a handful of exchanges, is little short of miraculous.

The chapter in which the Furlongs prepare for Christmas is a pure joy. The family attend the switching on of the lights, bake the cake, write letters to Santa. After the girls go to bed, their parents stay up and read their lists. “Isn’t it nice to see them showing some manners and not asking for the sun and stars?” Eileen says, as they discuss what to buy for each of them.

The genius is in the precision of the writing; in the details, and how Keegan makes each one count. When preparing the cake mixture, Furlong creams the butter and sugar, the girls grate the lemon rind, chop candied peel and pick stalks out of the dried fruit, while Eileen sifts the flour and spice. Soon the reader is moving to the rhythm of a marriage bound less by passion than by a shared domestic purpose: the running of a house and the raising of a family. She captures the contentment, but also the undercurrents that threaten it and the emotional gap opening up between him and Eileen.

Keegan’s later description of mass is equally uncanny. The babies given keys to play with and the gossipers on the edge of the aisle “watching for a new jacket, or a haircut or anything out of the ordinary" will resonate with the devout and lapsed alike. The simmering tension in the Furlongs’ marriage spills over in a single flash of anger over change for the collection.

Everything is pared back. There is no tension between Bill’s mother and her employer over their religious beliefs “which, on both sides, were lukewarm”. We never witness the nuns physically abusing the girls; what we see is them fawning over a girl who has clearly been abused while flaunting their power to exclude Furlong’s daughters from their school.

Even the heroism, when it comes, is a tender, low-key act rather than a grand gesture. And so, what the reader is left with is less a searing indictment of a national outrage than an affirmation of human decency. Small Things Like These assures us we are all capable of doing the right thing, and that goodness, like misery, can be handed on from man to man. It is a literary state of grace.