F E AT U R E
A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE IN CLAIRE KEEGAN’S NOVEL SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE, THE MAIN CHARACTER FACES A CHOICE BETWEEN COLLUDING WITH AUTHORITY OR ACTING WITH INTEGRITY BY EAMON MAHER
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laire Keegan first came onto my radar when she was described by no less an authority than Professor Declan Kiberd, on the occasion of the publication of her first short story collection Antarctica (1999), as “a writer already touched with greatness”, and as one of the possible successors to John McGahern. At the time, I was doubtful that such accolades were merited, but since reading the subsequent work, another short story collection Walk the Blue Fields (2007), the novella Foster (2010), and most recently a short novel entitled Small Things Like These (2021), I understand what all the hype is about. Every word of Keegan’s published work has weight, her characters have real depth, and her rendering of place is exceptional. Kiberd once described McGahern’s work to me as exemplifying the ‘iceberg effect’, by which he meant that although one only sees what is above water (in this case, on the page), the mass of unseen material underwater is what makes the work so perfect. This could also be said of Keegan. Her publications are sparse (another trait she shares with McGahern), but when she does release work for public consumption, the rigorous rewrites it has undergone are felt in the perfection of the prose and the authenticity of the human situations that are evoked. For the purposes of this article, I have decided to concentrate on Small Things Like These, which recounts the journey that leads Wexford coalman Bill Furlong to pit himself against one of the most powerful institutions of 1980s Ireland, the Catholic Church, by taking a girl out of the local Good Shepherd convent where she has ended up as a result of becoming pregnant outside of marriage.
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By dedicating the novel to “the women and children who suffered in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen Laundries”, Keegan reveals from the outset the main thrust of the novel’s plot. In an interview with Claire Armitstead for The Guardian newspaper, however, Keegan, when asked why she wrote a novel about the Magdalene Laundries, denied that this was her objective, before adding: “I think this is the story of a man with five daughters, in a marriage, who’s running a coal yard and is probably a workaholic, and maybe facing some kind of midlife crisis. I think it’s the story of a man who was loved in his youth and can’t resist offering the same type of love to somebody else.” EMPATHY At this point, some background information will be necessary for those who have not yet read the novel. Bill Furlong’s mother fell pregnant when she was 16 and was then abandoned by the man who had impregnated her. She was working at the time as a domestic for Mrs Wilson, a Protestant widow who lived in the Big House a short distance outside the town of New Ross. Rather than removing the girl from her position after hearing about the pregnancy, Mrs Wilson said that both she and her child would always be welcome in her house. Bill Furlong had therefore been a beneficiary of kindness from the moment he came into the world and so it was natural that he should try to demonstrate similar charity to others in unfortunate circumstances. This may be what prompts him to regularly give the son of local drunkard Mick Sinnott any change he has in his pocket, and to be moved to
tears on seeing a young schoolboy drinking milk out of a cat’s bowl behind the priest’s house one cold winter’s morning. But feeling empathy with the socially deprived does not involve confronting any power blocks or losing valuable customers, whereas taking up the cudgels for those in the care of the Good Shepherd nuns in the local conventcum-laundry business clearly could have dire consequences for Bill and his family. Arriving one day before Christmas with a load of timber and coal, he makes his way towards the rear of the convent where he spies within a small lighted chapel more than a dozen inmates, “down on their hands and knees with tins of old-fashioned lavender polish and rags, polishing their hearts out in circles on the floor.” None of them is wearing shoes and they all look malnourished and neglected. One of them glances up at him plaintively and asks, “Mister, won’t you help us?” From that point on, the path that Bill Furlong must follow begins to take shape. He cannot get the image of the girls out of his mind, as it reminds him of the fate that would have befallen his mother had it not been for her Protestant benefactor. After all, this is how the church and state dealt with what they referred to as ‘fallen women’ during the 1980s: many of those incarcerated were only ‘guilty’ of falling pregnant outside of wedlock, or coming from families that were too poor to look after them properly. When he discusses his dilemma with his wife Eileen, she recognises immediately that no good will come out of challenging the authority of the church, and that the immediate upshot will be her husband losing the contract with the nuns. She tries to make him see sense: “If you
