Small Things Like These
by Claire Keegan
Nominations: Booker Finalist 2022, Dublin Longlist 2023, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2022
Date Read: July 21, 2023
Bill Furlong is a coal & timber merchant, married with five daughters. Yes, five. What makes Furlong remarkable, however, is his ability to look at his life with gratitude – for his wife, his five daughters and having enough to put food on the table.
Having been raised by a single mother who was disowned by her own family for falling pregnant while unmarried, Furlong is especially sensitive to Sarah and how she is being treated. On a delivery to the convent, he find her locked inside the coal shed with no coat or shoes, no food or comfort. He realizes his own mother could have been treated like her had it not been for the kindness and generosity of Mrs. Wilson.
Furlong understands the fundamental truths about humanity: if you treat people well, they will treat you well; people can be good; kindness goes a long way in this world; he asks himself if here is any point in being alive without helping each other. His moral compass is so vivid and clear, his principles uncompromising.
In such a short novella, Keegan renders Furlong in such moral clarity that the reader can’t help but feel the outrage nearly missing from Sarah’s plight. As other reviewers have noted, the entire town seems complicit in the treatment of the Magdalene Laundry women. They “…survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.”
Finally the cruelty displayed by the nuns, allegedly Christian women. I will never cease to marvel at the atrocities committed in the name of God.
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