Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Advance Reader Copy (eARC) from the publisher via Netgalley included. No affiliate links used. Read my full disclosure policy here.
How do you talk about a novella that is just over 100 pages long and the blurb only eludes to the plot by stating that the protagonist, Bill Furlong, ‘encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.’?
Small Things Like These is set in New Ross in 1985, so it’s safe to say that most people in or from Ireland will immediately know what is being referred to. Yet, for people who don’t know the full extent of the Catholic Church’s control over Ireland and our history of ‘institutions’, much of the atmosphere of Small Things Like These is in sensing that something is wrong, but only discovering what that something is as Bill Furlong becomes more and more concerned about what is happening in the Good Sheperd Convent.
It is the weeks before Christmas and Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, is the busiest he has been all year. While going about his days, Furlong reflects on his unusual childhood and life as it is now, with his wife and daughters.
As I was reading the words Dickensian, fable and fairytale kept rattling around my brain. Small Things Like These is a strange blend of all three without fully committing to any of them. Dickens being referenced only added to this feeling.
Claire Keegan is a talented writer, she excels at describing the quiet moments of everyday life. However, for me, the elements of the story don’t quite come together. I don’t mean the actions Bill Furlong takes, but Keegan’s decision to end the novella where she does. Objectively, I understand why she did. But as a reader, it did not have the profound impact on me that it has had on others.
Which I know puts me in a minority.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is published by Faber & Faber and is available in hardback, ebook and audiobook format.
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