Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These is centered on Bill Furlong, a coal merchant preparing for the holiday season in a secluded Irish town during the winter of 1985. With a wife and five daughters to support, Bill has long focused on remaining credible with his fellow townsfolk by maintaining a reliable business. While making a delivery to the local convent, Bill catches a harrowing glimpse of poverty and cruelty behind its locked doors. What follows is a heart-wrenching account of an ordinary father and businessman contending with the ironclad grip of the Catholic church and the tightly-threaded social fabric of his community as he contemplates whether doing the right thing is worth sacrificing everything.
As Small Things Like These begins, the days leading up to Christmas imbue Bill’s hometown with an ambience of magic and Bill works hard to carry out final holiday coal deliveries. Bill is a highly sympathetic character, and readers quickly come to know him as the quintessential “man next door.” Keegan lends Bill’s third-person narration a simplistic, semi-detached quality; he speaks to readers in concise thoughts that are mainly focused on his day-to-day commitments to his family and business.
Still, Bill’s casual narration and his comfortable holiday routine thinly mask a past of pain and social ostracization. His childhood as the illegitimate son of a servant constantly lingers on the edge of his conscience. Keegan hands us an anecdotal flashback that captures Bill’s upbringing in the second chapter, and from that point, it is impossible for us not to see his sensitivity to the plight of the outcast and downtrodden leaking into every aspect of his daily life.
Bill reveals himself to be a tortured character experiencing constant unease at the harsh culture surrounding him—a culture which is all too eager to alienate unwed mothers and their children in solidarity with the norms of the Catholic church. Because Keegan has so skillfully created layers of complexity within her protagonist, the novella’s climactic moment—when Bill discovers an abused young woman in the convent, separated from her newborn child—feels heart-stopping and high-stakes, with readers wondering what the final outcome of Bill’s resulting internal struggle will be.
In keeping with the standard characteristics of a novella, Keegan explores a single central conflict within the limited space of one location. I do wonder how a full-fledged novel would have given Keegan more space to flesh out her central subject matter—Ireland’s brutal Magdalene Laundries and the “culture of silence” surrounding them—in greater depth. For example, Bill’s wife and daughters function primarily as foils to Bill in Small Things Like These, symbolizing the blessings Bill has worked hard to obtain despite his unconventional social standing and all that he will lose if he chooses to stand up against the town’s most powerful institution. I speculate that a novel would have enabled Keegan to bring these female characters’ perspectives into the fold in order to better address an issue that specifically concerns women’s social vulnerability.
With that said, Keegan accomplishes something outstanding in the novella format—she draws readers into a shameful and controversial part of Ireland’s history through the eyes of one townsman who has everything to lose and seemingly nothing to gain by rebelling against institutionalized abuse. In just 114 pages, Keegan crafts a thoughtful protagonist, absorbing small-town setting, and tense moral dilemma compelling enough to resonate with all kinds of readers. Small Things Like These prompts readers to turn inward and contemplate the terrible burden of doing the right thing in a world that so often encourages conformity and inaction in the face of injustice.
