The hero of Claire Keegan’s new novella Small Things Like These is a coal merchant in a rural Irish town. Bill Furlong is kind, proud of his family and hard working. But he is prone to wondering whether his life is too narrow: is there anything else that matters other than his wife and children? What might it have been like had he married someone else?
Small Things Like These is a tightly controlled story, dealing with the run up to Christmas amid the bitter winter of 1985. As Furlong carries out his final yuletide duties, he stumbles across an ailing young woman locked in a coal shed near the convent on the outskirts of town. She asks him to help find her baby.
And here is the tinder for the protagonist’s dilemma. Does Furlong heed his wife’s earlier advice—that to exist happily there are things we must ignore? Or ought he seek greater meaning outside his little, but good, life?
It is hard not to feel sorry for Keegan’s biggest fans: this is her first work in over a decade and, like her last book, Foster, it flirts with the boundary between short story and novel. But what she sacrifices in productivity she easily makes up for in quality.
Small Things Like These situates us in the daily melancholy of a dark December. Descriptions often evoke the final lines of Joyce’s “The Dead”: “snow was general all over Ireland.” Keegan’s prose is not sparse, but it is exact. When she tells us it was a winter “of crows” we know exactly what she means.
And the tension comes in Furlong’s psychological quandary. Small things make him happy: making Christmas cake, helping his daughters write letters to Father Christmas. But is there any point if he cannot look beyond his neatly ordered existence?
