This is by Claire Keegan, and it was published in 2021.

It's one of those books that has been nagging away at me for ages. It figured on that New York Times quarter-century list (both official and popular versions); it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 (alongside Oh William! -- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won); it won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. And various Substackers I follow kept recommending it.

Having read it, I don't know why I delayed. It's short; it's intense; it's atmospheric. And it carries a gut punch of meaning: At what point do we stop looking away from what is manifestly evil, and actually do something?

The novella is set in 1985. Which is really not that long ago... By that time, I'd already finished university and professional training, and was four years into a career...

At the close, there's a note on the text:

"Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry [the name is also regularly spelt Magdalene] was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated. In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home, in County Galway. These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013."

The issue came back into view a couple of years ago, after the death of Sinead O'Connor, who had been stuck in one such "Training Centre" for 18 months, as punishment for truancy and shoplifting: "She later referred to it as a 'prison', where she said she was deprived of a normal childhood, and girls 'cried every day'. Women lived and worked without wages -- O'Connor recalled being assigned jobs such as washing priests' clothes for no pay. She said the women generally studied maths and typing and had limited contact with their families."


Lovely cover... The Bruegel painting was the author's suggestion

So that's the background. And coming hard on the heels of some fairly fearsome nuns in Hilary Mantel's Fludd, it definitely isn't speaking into a void.

But Keegan doesn't give us all this up front. Instead, we first get to know the Furlong family. Bill is a coal merchant in a small Irish town. His mother was unmarried. She was just 16 when she got pregnant, and was rejected by her family... But she was lucky. Her widowed employer, Mrs Wilson, took her and the baby in. He was born on 1 April 1946, and "some said the boy would turn out to be a fool". By the end of the story, some will be saying that even louder... His mother died when he was 12, but Mrs Wilson continued to offer him a home, and he was brought up by her and farmhand Ned. He cops a bit of flak at school for being born the wrong side of the blanket (to use an expression I often heard during my childhood). But he marries Eileen, and Mrs Wilson gives him a few thousand pounds to help the couple get started.

Despite this stroke of good fortune, it's a precarious life: "It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew." Times are tough. Young people are emigrating; the shipyard company has closed; various firms are downsizing or closing their doors completely.

Bill still doesn't know who his father was, and it plays on his mind at times. Over the course of the narrative we get a hefty clue, but (as is the way with family revelations) the supposition only raises further questions.

He's a practical character, not allowing himself too much indulgence in reminiscence and surmise: "Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come."

What a profound passage... Yes, the past is good to look back on -- but only, I suppose, if you've taken advantage of the "days and chances which wouldn't come back around".

Bill also feels a bit stuck: "He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for."

Eileen, his wife, is efficient and capable, but she's not the reflective type. She's always moving from one job to the next -- and they have five children, so there are plenty of jobs. She's not large-hearted; she's maybe even a bit stingy, and Bill's little acts of generosity irk her sometimes. But then she's the one who has to run the household from day to day... Eileen's relentless busyness sometimes bothers Bill: "Always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things?"


Claire Keegan

***

The family exemplifies the truism that our lives are made up of small things, not big ones. The habits we develop, the choices we make, the routines that fill up our days:

"Sometimes Furlong, seeing the girls going through the small things which needed to be done -- genuflecting in the chapel or thanking a shopkeeper for the change -- felt a deep, private joy that these children were his own..." After a day's work, he sometimes thinks back over the events of the day, the characters of the town, the narrow line that separates good fortune from bad: "Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these..."

Conversely, small things sometimes take on disproportionate meaning at the time, only to recede into insignificance later: "[His mother] used to sometimes hold him in her strong, freckled arm while she turned the handle of the churn with the other; used to lay her head against the cow’s side and sing a song or two while she was milking with Ned in the evenings, to ease the milk coming down. And she had slapped him too, sometimes, for being bold or talking out of turn or leaving the lid off the butter-dish, but those things were only small..."

The picture of this 1980s family is also built up through the depiction of myriad small things: Ribena, the Rayburn, hot water bottles, Bristol Cream, Enid Blyton, sherry trifle, and so many more.

***

But the story: What's the story?

Well, it's nearly Christmas, and it's cold. Bitingly so. Which is good for Bill Furlong's coal business, but bleak nonetheless: "It was a December of crows. People had never seen the likes of them..."



Quite early in the narrative, we have our first mention of the local convent. It's where Bill's daughters take music lessons.

But when Bill goes there to make a delivery, it takes on a darker hue. It's described as "a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river with black, wide-open gates and a host of tall, shining windows, facing the town". There's what is known as a "training school" there, plus a laundry, which has a good reputation... But there's other talk, too, that's a bit more sinister. What can you believe?

Then, over the course of the narrative, Furlong has a couple of accidental encounters with figures who unambiguously arouse concern.

First, having entered the convent, he comes across young women on their hands and knees, polishing the floor. They look neglected. "Mister, won't you help us?" says one. "Just take me as far as the river. That's all you need do." The conversation is interrupted, but when he leaves, he notices that everyone is effectively locked in.

On driving out, he gets confused about the direction to take (perhaps the symbolism here is a little too heavy-handed...). He asks an old man by the wayside where the road he's following ends up. The man replies, "This road will take you wherever you want to go, son." Gareth Cornwell reminds us how this mirrors Nietzsche, who wrote: "There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it."

Bill tells Eileen about his experiences and impressions. But she insists that none of it has anything to do with them: "If you want to get on in life, there's things you have to ignore, so you can keep on." It's a good thing Mrs Wilson didn't think like that, Bill counters. But Eileen says it was all very well for her: She was rich.

Then, on his next visit to the convent, Furlong finds a young woman locked in the coalhouse. She seems to have been there for more than a night. "When he managed to get her out, and saw what was before him -- a girl just about fit to stand, with her hair roughly cut -- the ordinary part of him wished he'd never come near the place." She requests that he enquire about her 14-week-old baby.

The nuns do an expert job of covering up. They pretend surprise. They pretend the young woman (Sarah) is confused, "can't tell night from day sometimes". They give him tea. The Mother Superior asks after his daughters. They give the girl tea, and while she drinks it, she is manipulated into concocting a story -- that she was in the coal shed because of a game, because of a mistake, because of "a big nothing". She is sent off to have breakfast. On the way out, Furlong asks her if he can do anything: "All you need do is tell me," he says. But the girl, under observation, can't give him anything beyond basic details. As he leaves, he hears the key being turned in the lock.

Thinking back later, he's unhappy about what he did and didn't do: "The worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he’d allowed that and had not asked about her baby -- the one thing she had asked him to do -- and how he had taken the money [a Christmas gift] and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he’d gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass."


Ireland, 1992. When we made that visit, the laundries were still in existence...

Christmas Eve is busy with deliveries. Then the coal-workers are offered dinner, courtesy of the firm, at the eatery run by Mrs Kehoe. She has had wind of Bill's encounter at the convent, and tells him to be careful. She warns him that "these nuns have a finger in every pie", and can make or break the future of the local girls. "Surely they've only as much power as we give them," he suggests. But Mrs Kehoe is not convinced.

So Bill goes off to do his Christmas shopping. He collects the new shoes that are a gift for Eileen, and still restless, goes for a walk. Towards the convent... "It was not possible to see in, and the third-storey windows were blackened over and fitted with metal grilles... Turning a corner, he came across a black cat eating from the carcass of a crow, licking her lips." That doesn't bode well...

He goes to check the coal house. And there, again, is Sarah. He tells her to come with him. "He felt his self-preservation and courage battling against each other and thought, once more, of taking the girl to the priest’s house -- but several times, already, his mind had gone on ahead, and met him there, and had concluded that the priests already knew. Sure hadn’t Mrs Kehoe as much as told him so? They’re all the one."

So Bill and Sarah form their own tiny Christmas procession through the town to his home. She's barefoot, coal-dusted. He's coatless, having taken off his outer layer to keep her warm. "Not one person they met addressed Sarah or asked where he was taking her."

Bill asks himself: "Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?"

And this is the last mention of the "small things": "He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life."

He thinks to himself that his mother, had it not been for Mrs Wilson, could have ended up in that place, in that situation. "In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving -- if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up."

But he knows this thing he has done is only the beginning, not the end. And it's clever, the note of uncertainty that the book closes on: "Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been -- which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured, and might yet surpass. Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage."

Legitimately? That's an interesting choice of word, since the whole book is about people whom society has decreed to be "illegitimate".

In the great scheme of things, it's a small thing that Bill has done, but his action will expand like the ripples from a stone dropped into a pond. The potential repercussions, both for good and ill, are huge. We can imagine alternative futures for Bill: One where he becomes a local hero, opening up a much-needed conversation about what goes on in these institutions that people have known all their lives but never questioned; and one where he's ostracized and penniless, and his children, squeezed out of all the opportunities the convent and its entourage might have offered them, become bitter towards him for prioritizing the life of a stranger over their own.

Small things shape futures.



The author is ambivalent about her protagonist: "I'm not saying that my character isn’t heroic -- but I see Furlong as a self-destructive man and that this is the account of his breaking down. He’s coming into middle age, suffering an identity crisis, doesn’t know who his father is, and he’s also coming to terms with the fact that he was bullied at school. And his workaholism, which until now has kept the past at bay, is wearing thin... But I also like to think it’s a book about love. Furlong was loved as a child, was wanted at a time when so many children born within and outside of wedlock were unwanted... Without being loved as a child, Furlong might have been brutalised, grown hard as others did and self-centred -- and might also have done nothing."

Rather than focusing on Furlong's actions, David Butler sees the book more as "an investigation into the mechanics of complicity". He quotes Seamus Heaney's Punishment, whose harrowing verses talk about the way we cast "stones of silence" in the face of atrocities, acting as voyeurs, standing dumb, conniving "in civilized outrage" while doing nothing to halt the climate of revenge.

In sum, it's a beautiful little book, part parable, part historical realism laced with social commentary.

A good book should always leave you with the question: What would I have done? Well, this book leaves you with that question absolutely ricocheting around your brain. I suspect it won't be easy to forget.