Keegan captures a particular time and place, while also setting out the stakes.
Hard times, occasionally brightened, such as the turning on of the Christmas lights and the local councillor “wearing his brasses over a Crombie coat”. Many of the chapters begin with an unusual image: “It was a December of crows.” The depiction of the town and townspeople is equally deft: the closed shipyard, redundancies at the fertiliser factory, the local florist boarded up.
We get the weather, the season, the name of the town, where “chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings”. Set over a short time span – the busy weeks in the lead up to Christmas – with a linear narrative, the book opens big, like a 19th-century novel, inviting the reader into the world before tapering off to smaller, memorable details. Furlong and his wife Eileen have just enough money to keep their family going
Detailed, insightful and written with striking economy of language, it gets the reader remarkably close to the experience of the character, recalling Faulkner's line about the best fiction being truer than fact. Small Things Like These brings a fresh and sensitive perspective to an awful period in our collective history. Magdalene laundries, the incarceration of women, babies stolen, or worse, the rights of so many thousands denied over decades. The Wexford author's unsentimental, unshowy style seems a perfect fit for a story that pits one man against the power of the Catholic Church. He goes quietly about his business, in a way that will be familiar to fans of Keegan. Like the rest of the town, he has plenty of worries, but over the course of this short, masterful novel it is his concern for the welfare of strangers that sets him apart.įurlong is a hero in the classical sense, flawed and afraid, but ultimately noble. Furlong, a coal and timber merchant in New Ross, Wexford, has a wife and five daughters to support. The year is 1985, the country gripped by recession. “Something small and hard gathered in his throat then which he tried but felt unable to say or swallow.” Bill Furlong, the protagonist of Claire Keegan’s highly anticipated new novel, is the kind of man who lies awake at night reflecting on the small things.
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