This is a very quick read but no less devastating for it. Set in Ireland at Christmastime 1985, Small Things Like These centers around Bill Furlong, who was born to a teenage mother. Mother and son were luckily taken in by a kind, wealthy woman, and thanks to her generosity Bill now has a very respectable middle-class life. He runs a business delivering coal and he and his wife have five children, all girls. They’ll never be rich but they’re ahead on all the bills and thankful for it.
One day, while delivering coal to the local convent, Bill sees something he wasn’t meant to see: a young girl who has obviously been treated poorly. Anyone familiar with recent Irish history will, by this point in the story, have already recognized the convent as one of the country’s notorious Magdalene Laundries, where so called “fallen women” were mistreated and abused for decades.
In the moment, Bill doesn’t know the full of extent of what’s going on inside the convent’s walls, but he’s heard enough that the sight of that young girl lingers in his mind. As he tries to go about his days and celebrate the Christmas season with his wife and daughters, he is nagged by doubts. Doubts about his own fatherless past, doubts about his inaction in the sight of that mistreated little girl, and doubts about how he can go on participating in his society while knowing what he knows.
Keegan is a master of economical prose. There’s not a wasted word in this novella, and the fact that it packs such a punch is practically a miracle. Bill Furlong feels as fully realized in under 100 pages as many a character in a multi-novel series. The reader is immediately on his side, rooting for him as he struggles to find his way to the right course of action. He and his story will linger in the reader’s mind for far longer than it takes to read this marvelous book.
