Book Club: 'Small Things Like These' by Claire Keegan

This month, our Book Club gathered on Infinity Lawn for a well-attended meeting to discuss Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. 

At just 110 pages, generously spaced and with quite a large typeface, this book is a quick read on paper—but it proved to be rich and thought-provoking. Written in a deceptively simple and understated style, the story is set in a small Irish town in the run-up to Christmas in 1985—though in many ways, it feels as if it could just as easily be 1955.

We see events through the eyes of Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant. Bill lives with his contented, conventional wife and their five healthy, lively daughters. His own beginnings were more precarious: born to an unmarried mother and an unknown father, he was fortunate to have been sheltered and educated by his mother’s kind employer, Mrs Wilson. Around them, however, many families are far less lucky, with poverty and struggle made worse by the power of the Church and the mysteriously intimidating convent outside the town.

A turning point in the story comes when Bill, delivering coal to the convent, discovers a thin, shivering teenage girl locked in the coal shed. The Mother Superior, seemingly shocked, explains that another laundry girl must have done this, and the nuns fuss over the girl to warm her up. Bill is then handed a payment much larger than needed for his Christmas delivery. Though he thinks about it, family life and Christmas soon pull his attention away. But the incident repeats itself days later, and this time Bill realises the truth. In a quiet act of courage, he takes the girl home in his lorry. The story ends before he gets home—and before we see what consequences will follow from his decision.

This led to plenty of discussion among us. A lot is unspoken about the Magdalen laundries and the Church’s powerful hold over the community, and it’s all handled with great subtlety. We felt the community was beautifully depicted and we could empathise with almost everyone—though perhaps not so much with the Mother Superior. We also reflected that many of the nuns must have begun with kindness and idealism, only to be worn down by the system.

There’s also the mystery of Bill’s father, partially resolved but left inconclusive. Some in our group would have preferred a clear answer here, and one person thought ending on a cliff-hanger was something of a cop-out. But most of us respected the author’s choice to leave things open-ended, allowing readers to imagine what might happen next for Bill and how their world would go on into the next stages.

In the end, most of us agreed with the many critics who have described this as a small gem of a book: short, understated, but deeply moving.

Our next meeting is on Wednesday, 13th August when we will be discussing Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton.