Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These is a 2021 novella by the Irish writer Claire Keegan, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. Set in an Irish town before Christmas 1985, it follows a coal merchant who discovers what the local convent hides. It is studied in HSC English EAL/D Module B: Close Study of Text.

Small Things Like These was published in 2021 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. It is very short - a novella of about thirty thousand words - and Claire Keegan, an Irish writer known for her exactness, has said she cuts everything a story can live without. Nothing in it is accidental, and much of its meaning is carried by what is left out.

The novella is set in New Ross, a small town in County Wexford, in the weeks before Christmas 1985. Its centre is Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant: a decent, hard-working man with a wife, Eileen, and five daughters. Ireland in 1985 is poor and cold, and the Catholic Church holds enormous power over ordinary life - schools, hospitals, reputations and work. Furlong delivers coal to the local convent, which runs a "training school" and laundry for girls - a Magdalen laundry, one of the institutions in which the Church confined thousands of Irish women and girls - and there, opening the coal shed, he finds a girl locked inside, "just about fit to stand, with her hair roughly cut". The Mother Superior smooths the moment over with tea, money and quiet threat, and Furlong leaves without acting.

Furlong was himself born to an unmarried sixteen-year-old servant and raised in the house of her Protestant employer, Mrs Wilson, who chose kindness when the town expected shame - he could easily have been a child handed to such an institution. Home, church and town press their expectations on him, and Eileen urges caution, but Furlong cannot stop thinking about the girl. In the final chapter he returns to the convent, opens the coal shed again, and walks the girl out toward his own home through the town, in full view, knowing "the worst was yet to come". The novella ends there, on the walk, before anything that follows.

The novella's central concern is how ordinary, decent people become complicit in cruelty simply by getting on with their lives. Furlong's daily habit is "to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people", and Keegan's free indirect discourse lets the reader adopt his caution from inside before feeling its cost. Complicity is diagnosed as routine - "Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand." - and conscience surfaces as unfinished questions: "Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?"

Keegan's restraint is a moral method as much as a style. The girl in the coal shed says little; her suffering is rendered in one flat clause and then withheld, forcing the reader to do the imaginative and moral work rather than consume the horror as spectacle. The novella ends at the moment of decision, before the consequences - a withheld climax that refuses to reassure us that courage is rewarded.

Class and kindness run beneath everything. Furlong "had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say.", and the mercy Mrs Wilson showed his mother becomes the inheritance he finally repays. Keegan's title names the ethic: it is "the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say" that, "when added up, amounted to a life" - character built from an accumulation of ordinary decisions rather than one grand gesture.

The Church's power, meanwhile, works through dependence rather than open threat. The Mother Superior mentions with a smile that Furlong's daughter is "in the choir now" and "doesn't look out of place", describes the confined girls in flat bureaucratic euphemism - "It's just that there's so many nowadays." - and the system of control becomes audible in one small sound, a key turning in a lock. Against all of it, Furlong's mild question names the novella's quiet argument: "Surely they've only as much power as we give them, Mrs Kehoe?" Institutions rule by consent, and can be refused - not overthrown, but quietly walked past, one person at a time.