Claire Keegan’s Novella Is A Simple, Short, and Stirring Story of Gratitude and Goodness

I checked out “Small Things Like These,” which won the Orwell Prize for political fiction and was shortlisted for one of my nerdy fave fiction prizes, the Booker Prize, because Your Humble Narrator is actually going to see her speechify in person at a conference in July and it’s going to be awesome.

“Small Things,” which was made into a movie last year starring Cillian Murphy, is a lean book at only 114 pages (I knocked it out in just 4 days) but packs an affecting punch. It follows just a few days in the life of coal and fuel merchant, Billy Furlong, in a small Irish town struggling economically in the 1980s, and an existential crisis he’s going through. It’s pretty amazing how well Keegan characterizes Furlong in just a shade over a hundred pages, compared to cases where we see way worse character development over seasons of a TV show, three hour movies, or books three times as long, but Furlong is a great character handled with expertise in a really short burst of storytelling.

Furlong is a character that is complex and deep, devoutly loyal to his family while also wondering if he should be doing more with his life, dedicated and grateful but also anxious and restless. And all of these contradictions are handled with great subtlety by Keegan, who doesn’t depict the character or write the novel in a flashy way at all but very simple, realistic and calm.

The plot functions in a similarly quiet way, as Billy discovers the mistreatment of girls at a local convent and struggles between looking the other way to please the church or do what others are fearful of and do something about it. The vague but sinister abuse the girls suffer is actually based on a true scandal in the UK of the Magdalene laundries, where religious figures would house young women suffering from unwanted pregnancies and subsequently abuse the girls and their children. It’s devastating to learn about, and makes “Small Things” not just a meditation of doing something good with one’s life, but a protest against the powerful preying on the powerless.

When the biggest issue with your book is that I wish it was longer, that’s a pretty solid complaint, and that’s the case with “Small Things,” which is powerful and meaningful, but maybe just too slight, as it could have been even better if it was maybe a little longer. But again, that’s a solid complaint, when your book is so awesome you could’ve read more of it.