Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
A Novel
Title: Small Things Like These
Author: Claire Keegan
Publisher: Grove Press
Publication Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780802158741
Rating: 4 stars
I came across this book in a bookstore last year. The simple color-scheme of the jacket caught my eye. In the months since I first saw it, this book has been recommended to me multiple times, so I borrowed it from the library to see what all the fuss was about. The book is short—only 114 pages, but I found the writing so engrossingly beautiful.
The story takes place in Ireland in the 1980s. Things are difficult economically and as what is sure to be a lean Christmas approaches, Bill Furlong, a coal and wood merchant, wants to do what he can to make sure his customers will be warm over the holiday, even if they can’t pay. Bill is a family man with a wife he loves and five wonderful daughters that he wants to make sure are all able to attend the local Catholic high school. He works hard, but he isn’t afraid of a little hard work to take care of those he loves.
However, in the course of a couple of weeks, his deliveries take him to the convent on the top of the hill where it is rumored the nuns run a “Magdalene Laundry.” He accidentally gets a glimpse of the “fallen women” who are kept there, some no older than his own daughters. He sees the back-breaking labor they are forced to do and the privations they face. When he finds Sarah, a young unwed mother locked in the coal shed (where she has clearly been for days) during a cold snap, he tries to interfere by bringing her back in to the convent. The nuns play it off and offer him a Christmas card with 50 pounds in it, which he accepts and leaves. However, he cannot forget about Sarah. Sarah was the name of his own mother, who was also young and unwed when he was born. If it weren’t for the kind Mrs. Wilson who employed his mother and raised him, he might have been born in a place like the convent and his mother would have suffered like the young Sarah he finds in the shed.
Restless on Christmas Eve, Bill decides he can no longer let Sarah’s fate sit on his conscience even though he has been warned that going against the nuns could hurt his daughters’ futures. He returns to the convent looking for Sarah with the goal of saving her.
The writing in this book was gorgeous. Because it is so short, it is clear that each word matters and was chosen intentionally for effect. I could envision this small town and the lives of people like Bill and his family. I feel like it ends on a bit of a cliff hanger too, which I really liked because Bill is making a huge, potentially dangerous decision that could very well change everything for himself and his family, but we don’t get to see the outcome of his decision. Like in life, we can’t be sure of exactly what repercussions come from the choice he is actively making when the book ends.
I also found this book really interesting because I knew about the homes for unwed mothers we had here in the US, but I hadn’t previously heard of “Magdalene Laundries.” According to Justice For Magdalenes Research, “From the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 until 1996, at least 10,000 girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions.” A woman or girl could be sent to a Magdalene Laundry by just about anyone for a variety of reasons: pregnancy (whether from consensual sex or non-consensual sex), being the daughter of an unwed mother, surviving physical abuse, being in foster care, having a physical or mental disability or illness, being accused of being promiscuous, and illegal activities (though none of these things had to be proven for a girl to be locked in). The women worked at extremely difficult jobs as long as they possibly could and the laundries made money off of their labor without paying them or even really meeting their material needs. Many women died in this captivity and were buried in unmarked mass graves. Those who did survive their ordeal were often given new names when they left and were threatened not to go looking for their old families, talk about their time in the laundry, or talk about their life before. While these Magdalene Laundries were mostly run by the church, they were sanctioned by the Irish government, who only just issued an apology in 2013. I was horrified to learn about all this and shocked that I hadn’t heard about it considering it was going on during my lifetime. This book definitely inspired me to want to learn more about Magdalene Laundries and what is currently being done for the women who survived their imprisonment there.
When Bill first discovers the condition of the Magdalene Laundry at the convent, multiple women try to warn him away from getting involved. When Bill tells his wife Eileen what he saw, she says, “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on…If we just mind what we have here and stay on the right side of people and soldier on, none of ours will ever have to endure the likes of what them girls go through” (48-49). Later, Mrs. Kehoe, the restaurant owner, also warns him, “You’ve worked hard, the same as myself, to get to where you are now. You’ve reared a fine family of girls—and you know there’s nothing only a wall separating that place from St. Margaret’s [the Catholic school two of his daughters attend that he hopes they will all go to]…[the girls in the school and the girls in the laundry] belong to different orders…but believe you me, they’re all one. You can’t side against one without damaging your chances with the other” (99-100). The women know how dangerous challenging the power can be and seem to be trying to warn Bill about how standing up for these women could lead to his daughters being one of them. I thought that was a little dramatic at first, but now that I better understand how women ended up in Magdalene Laundries, I realize they aren’t being dramatic enough. I felt this undercurrent throughout the book about the importance of female knowledge, things that are constantly out of Bill’s reach because he doesn’t really understand what it is like to be a woman and how love for his wife and daughters alone isn’t enough to bridge that gap. That also made the ending more intriguing because despite all the warnings, to me, it didn’t feel like Bill fully understood the stakes of helping Sarah. He is so busy looking at it from the point of view of the son of an unwed mother that he doesn’t fully understand how his choices could impact his own daughters. Though I think that could be debated.
The only thing that I didn’t love about this book was that there were parts where Bill seemed a little bit like a lecher. I think it feeds into the themes of Bill wanting to know his mother and the way Bill doesn’t fully understand what it is to be a woman, but there are certain times, specifically one instance where Bill describes looking at a woman’s breasts while she’s in her nightgown, that I didn’t really love. I think in a book this short, Keegan wouldn’t have included it if it didn’t serve a purpose, but it just made me dislike Bill at that moment and it took me a minute to warm back up to him. There were one or two other moments like this, but that is the one that sticks in my head. I think a lot of people would like that Bill is a flawed character and not just some “protector of women with a heart of gold,” but seeing moments of lust from him wrapped up in all the discussion of his own mother and Sarah, the other unwed mother, just felt a little Oedipal to me and I wasn’t ready to go that deep.
Despite its brevity, this little book is very complex and I think you could get some spirited debate and discussion out of it. I think it would be a very interesting book to read and discuss in a book club setting.