As it is, the insular psychological study and the biting social condemnation never fully fuse. At others, it begs to be pared down to a tauter, more suggestive short story. (An afterword explains the social context behind the story.) Also, what may be a life-changing revelation about Furlong’s father is delivered in an offhand manner.Īt times, Small Things Like These begs for the full scope of a novel that moves beyond the story’s ending and deals with the consequences of the final act. It is a compelling plot device to put Furlong in conflict with this institution and the local Mother Superior after he discovers a girl locked in a convent coal shed, but the conflict appears suddenly, culminates quickly, and leaves too many questions unanswered. Just as remarkable is the Irish state’s longstanding acceptance of them as a social institution. Remarkably, these social institutions existed for more than two hundred years, the last one closing in 1996. Their children often died there as well, or were surreptitiously offered up for adoption. Because of his “illegitimacy,” Furlong is a compelling central figure for the writer’s larger ambition, which is to condemn the “Magdalen laundries,” Catholic Church–sponsored homes in which disenfranchised girls and women were essentially incarcerated, put to work, and abused, sometimes ending up in unmarked graves. Furlong sees his own potential fate in the lives of the less fortunate and is kept up at night ruminating “over small things like these”-the random-seeming moments that separate good fortune from misfortune.įurlong also spends a lot of time wondering about the identity of his father. When he sees a small boy foraging for sticks along the road, he offers him a ride and the change in his pocket, knowing that the boy’s father is an alcoholic. Wilson, is able to escape poverty without getting separated from his mother.įurlong is humble, hardworking, and deeply compassionate.
A family man, he enjoys a level of success that belies his origins: born to an unwed sixteen-year-old mother-a deep mark of shame in Catholic Ireland-Furlong, through the generosity of a wealthy Protestant benefactress, Mrs. This character study is really the bulk of the plot, which moves not through propulsion, but by a steady undertow of dread embodied by its protagonist, Bill Furlong.įurlong is a coal and wood merchant living in a small Irish town in 1985. On the one hand, it has the scathing social and religious indictment of a longer novel on the other, it is a quiet and morose character study, a novella that delves into one man’s psychology and moral fiber. At just over one hundred pages, Irish writer Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a deceptively slim volume.
0 kommentar(er)
