Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan Review

It’s Christmas week in a small Irish town in the mid ‘80s and Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, is busy finishing off his deliveries and getting the presents for his wife and five daughters. But a chance delivery to the local convent for “wayward girls” (girls who got pregnant out of wedlock and have no-one to look out for them) reveals something about the Catholic Church to Bill - a shadow of a doubt that lingers until he can’t ignore the blight in his humble rural community…

Claire Keegan’s second novel, Small Things Like These, has made it onto the Booker shortlist and, shocker of shockers, it’s actually a good book - those almost never make it this far for that award!

It takes a while to get going though and that’s the only real criticism I’ll level at it - for a novel not much over 100 pages long, it’s 30-something pages in before we get a hint of what it’s about and I feel like, for such a limited amount of space, Keegan should’ve gotten her skates on a bit more.

Up until then, the novel is a well-written if unremarkable portrait of rural 20th century Irish life without any real drama. I can see why Keegan perhaps chose to tell her story this way because once Bill enters the convent, his encounter with one of the girls is quite shocking and lends the novel an effectively sinister atmosphere almost immediately.

It gets more interesting from then on as Bill learns the extent of what’s really going on in the convent and grapples with his feelings of what to do about it. You see how the Church was able to operate the way it did when it held such sway over the communities it inhabited, controlling people through faith and money. That tense scene between Bill and the Mother Superior was really standout.

I had to keep reminding myself that this was the mid-1980s because it feels so anachronistic - there’s literally a man driving coal and wood to houses so they can heat their homes, and religion is such a dominant force in the town; it’s like the 1880s rather than the 1980s!

Sometimes you get an authorial “Note on the Text” after a novel and I don’t think I’ve ever read one that was quite so powerful as the one that follows this story. It completely contextualises the story to make you understand what was happening and why it was set in the time it was.

I knew the Catholic Church was one of the most evil institutions ever created beforehand but this novel only provides one more reason why it is so wretched. You can keenly feel the quiet fury and bitter condemnation of the Church’s behaviour in Ireland, and everywhere it has a presence, by Keegan. Its atrocities continue to be uncovered to this day but amazingly they still have power. It’d be like if the Nazi Party was still around and allowed to operate after WW2!

I especially liked the ending that brings us back to the start of the novel. The “small things” are kindnesses shown by people to people who aren’t related to you but who need help. Like Mrs Wilson, Bill’s actions go against the established order of society but it’s a society that clearly needs to change, and eventually does - through brave people like him. It’s worth noting that in a book featuring priests and nuns, the most compassionate characters are neither of these and merely tolerate the dogma of religion rather than propagate it.

This theme of humanism is emphasised in Bill not knowing - but strongly suspecting by the end - who his father was. Despite not having a dad, he was looked after by others who weren’t his blood relatives (or were they?), showing us that everyone has the capacity to impact anyone’s lives for the better if they care enough, regardless of whether they’re doing it for an “eternal reward” either.

I haven’t read the other nominees on the shortlist yet so I can’t say whether or not this book deserves to win, but I doubt it would even if I thought that - the really good ones rarely do (Life of Pi and The Remains of the Day being the exceptions), though I hope it does. Either way, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a fine novel that’ll be around far longer than this awards season, with a memorable and increasingly compelling narrative, accessible and layered writing, fully-realised characters, convincing dialogue and inspiring heart - well worth reading.