The townspeople of New Ross in County Wexford, in the south east of Ireland, don’t expect to see the town bedecked with Christmas lights and tinsel in March, but that what’s they got this year as filming of Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These (Faber and Faber, 2022) made December of early Spring.
Her work has form in this. An earlier novella, Foster (Faber and Faber, 2010), was adapted and made into an Academy Award nominated feature film An Cailín Ciúin (Inscéal, 2022). The new film can also be expected to make an impact, not only on the people of New Ross but internationally, with Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Batman Begins, Oppenheimer) in the lead role, playing Bill Furlong, the one stand-up, decent man in the town at the time of the major Christian festival of birth and childhood, care and compassion.
Setting the story at Christmas is inspired. Setting it in the town and not the convent-laundry is telling, for it is in the town that the deepest ills reside. The blind eye, the touched forelock, the kissing of the ring, the bent knee.
The people of Ireland donned a holy cloak of submission when they threw off the suffocating blankets of British colonialism. They covered themselves with the poisoned mantilla of clericalism and only recently have they thrown it off. The stench of it lingers, as clerical organisations, including nuns, dodge through legal channels to avoid making warranted redress for abuses committed in their name.
Chapter 4 opens with crows, as the convent-laundry is brought to the fore.
It was a December of crows. People had never seen the likes of them, gathering in black batches on the outskirts of town, then coming in, walking the streets, cocking their heads and perching impudently on whatever lookout post took their fancy, scavenging for anything that looked edible along the roads before roosting at night in the huge old trees around the convent.
This sturdy and elegant sentence parades the nuns, in their power, through the town. Crows feature in Bruegel The Elder’s painting on the cover of the book.
Claire Keegan’s novella is a gem. As a hard-backed physical object it offers pleasure in its design, heft, shape and form. The cover shows the winter scene from the Pieter Bruegel The Elder painting Hunters in Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). It prepares the reader for the chill and for the hunt ahead.
In Bill Furlong, Claire Keegan has created a small-time epic hunter, with a distinct series of nods to the rural epic of Patrick Kavanagh, who wrote
… Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
The ‘local row’ that impels Bill Furlong’s hunt festers in the seething underbelly of latent violence in a town in thrall to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. He acts when he witnesses that violence made manifest with consequences that take us into the time beyond the book. His hunt is for decency and care, the very charms that flame at Christmas. He finds them in himself, not in the manger.
Furlong enters this December as he does every December of his adult life, performing his duties as a coal merchant with petit-bourgeois decency. Everybody has a good word on him. But this December is different. It will make the world anew for himself and the ones he loves. The renewal will not be the one promulgated by the Church. It will be more earthly, akin to the snow-covered fields of the Breughel painting.
The story of the individual who stands up against victimisation wrought by Power, offering dissent, even in a small way, is curative. It makes for a heartening story. In Claire Keegan’s hands, it makes for a small master work.
Bill Furlong could be played by Gregory Peck, in his To Kill a Mockingbird manifestation, a famous Hollywood black and white film. Like Harper Lee’s novel on which that film is based, Claire Keegan’s book is fronted by a citizen standing up to power. Honour and decency are the human characteristics brought to bear in the story of Furlong’s refusal to collude with something he and all his neighbours know to be wrong, though most keep quiet about it.
Scene setting and dialogues are rooted and believable in Small Things Like These. The river Barrow flows. The people shop. The Furlong household is a traditional Irish social set-up of the man earning and the woman running the home. A warm, old-school domesticity is portrayed in the relationship between Bill and his wife Eileen. It feels like the 1950s, but the book is set in the 1980s, as revealed by the requests their children make for Christmas gifts: Levis for Kathleen, A Queen album for Joan, scrabble for Sheila, a globe for Grace and Enid Blyton’s Five go Down to the Sea for Loretta.
The children’s names, five of them, declaim an Irish Catholic household. Their requests declaim the 1980s. The Live Aid concert took place in July 1985. Queen was one of the star bands on stage at Wembley Arena. One hundred and twenty seven million dollars were raised by the event. Forty years on, famine persists in parts of Africa. It’ll take more than Rock and Roll to support the people of the continent to defeat hunger in their countries.
I worked in a convent-laundry in Waterford, in the summer of 1980. I drove a delivery truck and did a number of shifts on the floor of the laundry, alongside the women held there and other men and women who came from the surrounding estates, as dayworkers. My mother and other women from our terrace worked there. I was jobless and penniless after four years of voluntary work in South-East Asia and West Africa. It is one of my life’s ironies that I earned a living by not expressing solidarity for an oppressed group, the women held in the Good Shepherd’s laundry in Waterford, following four years of solidarity work in the so-called Third World.
I was not alone. Unlike Bill Furlong, I colluded directly with the Church in its incarceration of the women.
I remember my mother bringing women she worked beside to our home when I was a teenager. They were a pair of excited girls on a spree. Kindness was a charm my mother possessed, a manifestation of solidarity in circumstances of economic need and the power structures that held sway. It took more than tea and biscuits or the sterling action of Bill Furlong to overturn the embedded power of the Roman Catholic Church.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is an exemplary book. Its tone, characters, set pieces, language and story-arc persist. Recommended.
Small Things Like These, book, Claire Keegan, Faber and Faber, London, 2022
Hunters in the Snow, painting, Pieter Bruegel The Elder, 1565
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunters_in_the_Snow
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