Some books make their point by shouting. Small Things Like These makes its point by leaving a room very quiet. Claire Keegan's novella runs to barely a hundred pages and unfolds over a few weeks in the winter of 1985, in a small town in County Wexford. You could read it in a single evening. You will think about it for a good deal longer, and you will probably press it into a friend's hands without saying much about why.
What happens in Small Things Like These
Bill Furlong is a coal and timber merchant in New Ross, a town where everyone knows what everyone else does for a living. He has five daughters, a practical wife called Eileen, and a business that runs on goodwill and cold weather. The weeks before Christmas are the ones that pay for the rest of the year.
Among his regular deliveries is the convent on the edge of town, where an order of nuns runs a laundry. One morning, a delivery takes him somewhere he is not meant to be, and he finds a young woman locked in a coal shed, cold and frightened. He puts her back inside, as he is told to, and drives home to his own fires and his own children. The rest of the book is about what that knowledge does to him.
Keegan also gives us Bill's beginnings. He was born to an unmarried mother and had a start in life thanks to the widow who employed her — a piece of luck he has never quite been able to explain to himself. That history is the reason the girl's face will not leave him alone.
The setting: an Irish Christmas with a cold centre
The Magdalen laundries were real. For much of the twentieth century, women and girls were confined in institutions run by religious congregations and made to work unpaid, often for years, sometimes for a lifetime. The last of the laundries closed in 1996, and a formal state apology came only in 2013.
Keegan never explains any of this, and she never lectures. She trusts the reader to know, or to look it up afterwards, and the result is a book that feels far bigger than its page count. The town knows what goes on behind the convent wall. The woman at the till knows. The men in the yard know. Everyone arranges their face accordingly, and Christmas makes the arranging harder, because the season piles on carols, school plays, coins for the collection and a general expectation that everyone will be kind.
What stays with you are the small physical facts: the price of coal, the wet wool, the cold that gets into a van, the ordinary politeness of people who are quietly deciding not to ask a question. This is a Christmas book without a scrap of cosiness in it, and that is exactly what makes it worth reading in December.
The prose: how Keegan does so much with so little
Keegan writes plain sentences. Subjects, verbs, objects. Very little metaphor, almost no rhetorical flourish, dialogue that sounds as if it has been overheard in a shop rather than composed. The effect, page after page, is of great restraint being applied to great pressure.
What she leaves out
Her real technique is subtraction. A conversation between Bill and Eileen will circle the one sentence that needs saying and never say it. A gesture — a hand on a shoulder, a kettle put on, a coat taken down from a hook — carries the emotion that a lesser writer would hand to an adjective. You finish a paragraph and realise you have been holding your breath.
Why it works
Because the reader does the feeling. Keegan gives you the facts of a scene and leaves the judgement to you, so the book becomes personal in a way that a more explicit novel could not manage. If you have ever sat at a kitchen table and decided to say nothing, this book will find you.
Bill Furlong, and why he is hard to forget
Bill is not a hero in any cinematic sense. He is tired. He wants a quiet life, a good Christmas, his daughters to do well, his wife not to worry. He knows exactly what speaking up would cost: the convent's custom, the goodwill of neighbours, Eileen's peace of mind. The book's tension sits in that ordinary arithmetic, and its power comes from the fact that the right thing and the easy thing are priced so clearly against each other.
He is not a mouthpiece for a message. He is a man who cannot stop thinking, and Keegan lets us watch him try to live alongside what he has seen. That is far more affecting than any speech about injustice would be.
Reading it well: five practical notes
- Read it in one sitting. It is short enough to finish in an evening, and the accumulated effect depends on not leaving a fortnight between sittings.
- Do not rush the opening. The domestic detail about coal bags, order books and school runs is not decoration. It is the argument.
- Read the final two pages twice. The ending is quiet and precise, and it rewards a slower second pass.
- Follow it with Foster, Keegan's longer story about a child sent to relatives for a summer. The film The Quiet Girl is based on it. Reading the two together shows how consistent her method is, and how much a child's view of the world changes the temperature of a book.
- If you run a book group, flag the subject matter in advance. The treatment of young women in religious institutions is distressing, and some readers will want to know that before they start rather than after.
Read the book before you watch the film
The 2024 adaptation gives Bill's part to Cillian Murphy, and it is a faithful, well-made piece of filmmaking. It is also, necessarily, an outside view of him. Cinema can show you a man standing in a yard in the rain; it cannot show you the argument going on in his head. Start with the book, then watch the film and notice how much of the story had to be carried by faces and silence. Both are worth your time, in that order.
Should you read it?
Yes, and soon, particularly if you like literary fiction that trusts you, or Irish writing at its most controlled, or Christmas stories that are honest about what people are capable of. Readers who need something happening on every page should know what they are getting: this is a book about a decision, not an adventure, though at this length there is nothing to skip.
It is widely available in paperback, on library shelves and in charity shops, and it makes an excellent short gift for someone who reads a great deal. Give it an evening this winter. A hundred pages, one man, one cold morning — and a question about silence and complicity that most novels of four times the length never get near.
Photo: BayzidIslam / Pixabay
