Mind Picker: Small Things Like These

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these. Other times, after a day of heavy lifting or being delayed by a puncture and getting soaked out on the road, he’d come home and eat his fill and fall into bed early, then wake in the night sensing Eileen, heavy in sleep, at his side — and there he’d lie with his mind going round in circles, agitating, before finally he’d have to go down and put the kettle on, for tea.

I really wanted to love Small Things Like These — I favour Irish storytellers and this opened with delightful prose and turns of phrase; eventually turning to deal with darker matter — and as ever, I feel a bit heartless when a book about important events, which other readers found affecting, leaves me cold. This is quite a short read, quiet and atmospheric, but I think it was a bit too quiet for me. Even so, Claire Keegan is enjoying critical success with this story — and any effort to shine a light in the dark corners of history is a worthwhile endeavour — and while I liked everything that’s in here, I simply wanted more.

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

Touching forty, Bill Furlong has five well-behaved daughters and a capable, pragmatic wife. And while every day he witnesses people suffering the effects of an economic downturn (the setting is New Ross, Ireland in 1985), as a fuel supplier, he is able to provide his own family with just enough of everything: the girls go to the only decent school in the area; he finds the cash to pay off the butcher (even if he lets too many of his customers put their bills “on the slate”); his wife, Eileen, might even be able to get new windows to replace the draughty ones in the upcoming year. Even so, Furlong feels a midlife malaise, and his constant wondering if this is all there is to life sets a tense and sombre tone for the novel. We learn Furlong’s back story — as the son of an unwed mother who raised him in a Protestant widow’s big home, his childhood was both privileged and challenging, with the other Catholic kids calling him names and beating him up — and the reader grows to understand that Furlong still mentally walks the line between insider and outsider in the community. So when he discovers some disturbing facts about the girls’ “training school” that operates out of the local convent, he’s presented with a dilemma: Should he intervene and risk his family’s fragile social standing or can he live with himself if — like every other person in the city, county, and country — he turns a blind eye to the stranglehold of the Church and their treatment of young women?

He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

Perhaps my problem is that there’s not a lot of facts and details in this book: Furlong is dealing with his mid-life crisis and what he discovers at the convent is meant to shake him out of his malaise and decide what kind of person he really is; we are stuck solely in his troubled mind. In an afterword, Keegan explains Ireland’s Magdalen laundries (how many tens of thousands of young women were involved; that the last one was closed in 1996), and while I do appreciate a light being shone on that dark history, neither we the readers or Furlong himself actually see what’s going on in the convent (yet he’s been the fuel supplier there for his entire adult life and never stumbled upon the true nature of the “training school” before?) I think I would have rather seen more goings on in the convent or for there to have been more acknowledgement that the community knew exactly what the nuns were up to and willfully ignored it. Instead we get this existential crisis and a provocation to action — and Keegan gives just barely enough information for us to understand what the stakes are for Furlong and his family if he does act — and the whole seems intended to ask a question instead of taking a stance. And that wasn’t enough for me; rounding down to three stars despite admiring the writing.