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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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Claire 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. 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
want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.”
However, Furlong can no longer remain inactive when he discovers a young girl in the convent fuel shed, still lactating after having given birth to a baby a few months previously, shivering and suffering from possible hypothermia. The traces of excrement on the shed floor show that she has been there for some time. In his subsequent discussion with the mother superior, Furlong is told that the girls must have played a prank on their friend and locked her in the shed. The nun’s sole concern seems to be with administering punishment to those in her care and making as much money as possible from their unpaid work in the laundry. In her interview with Armitstead, Keegan was at pains to point out that her desire was not in any way to demonise the nuns, who were after all in concert with the state agencies and society in general in behaving as they did. She left Ireland in 1986, the year that Ann Lovett, a young teenager, gave birth to a child in a local grotto to the Virgin Mary in Granard, Co. Longford, an incident that intensely shocked Irish society and caused a number of women to ring Gay Byrne’s radio programme to share their stories of unplanned pregnancies.
TAKING A STANCE
This may well have influenced the gloomy tone of Keegan’s novel. She explained to Emily Hourican, a journalist with the Irish Independent: “I felt the darkness that is in Small Things Like These. I felt that atmosphere of unemployment, and being trapped maybe.” There is a sense in which Bill Furlong, by taking the young girl (Sarah is her name) out of the convent and bringing her to his own house, is redeeming the collusion of so many people in Ireland, who knew what was happening in industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries, and did nothing. Walking with Sarah along the streets of New Ross, he achieves a type of catharsis:
As they carried on along and met other people Furlong did and did not know, 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?
Very important questions are raised here in relation to the obligation on the part of a Christian to face down injustice and bear witness to the Gospel message of love, especially for the poor, the sick and the oppressed. Who could be considered more in need of help than those young women committed to the Magdalene Laundries? By taking a stance that will almost certainly have serious repercussions for himself and his family, Bill Furlong strikes a blow for the innocent victims who were kept in horrible conditions, sometimes tortured, poorly fed, all in the name of a public morality that was miles away from the love of sinners that characterised the life and teaching of the founder of Christianity. This may explain the upbeat tenor of Keegan’s character as he makes his way home with Sarah:
The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.
The quote that is often (wrongly) attributed to Edmund Burke – “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” – immediately springs to mind at this point, as it captures how evil is often allowed to thrive by people not being prepared to confront or combat it. Bill Furlong will never have to live with the guilt associated with inaction, which may well explain his optimism in the last lines of the novel:
Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.
It is no coincidence that Keegan’s novel ends on a cold Christmas Eve, at a time when people are looking forward to spending time with loved ones, sharing food and presents, and perhaps reflecting on how different this is from the night that God took human form in a stable. Small Things Like These is a beautiful novel that highlights how people should follow their conscience if they aspire to live authentic lives. Bill Furlong knows that and hence he takes the only decision that would allow him a future free of guilt. When faced with similar dilemmas, hopefully many of us would act in a similar manner.
