Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These is a story of moral crisis, heroism and the human heart
CBC Radio | Posted: April 22, 2022 5:27 PM | Last Updated: April 22, 2022
It's a cold, wet December in small-town Ireland, during a time of economic hardship and the authority of the Catholic Church. Making his delivery to the local convent, a coalman finds a shivering, ragged girl locked in the shed. He knows he should look away and not ask questions. But he can't help himself.
That's the premise of Claire Keegan's gem of a novella, Small Things Like These — a moving tale of complicity and human decency. Keegan is the author of prize-winning short fiction, including two story collections, Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields. Subtle and truthful, her work has been widely praised for its emotional honesty. As one critic put it, she has "an eerily acute ear for dialogue, but her real gift is for what goes unsaid."
Keegan spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from her home in southeast Ireland.
The back door
"The Ferns Report was about abuses in the church here in Ireland. I was writer-in-residence at University College Cork at the time. There was a spread in the newspaper with victims' testimonies. I just read through those and was floored. I thought about somebody finding somebody in a shed — and that stayed in the back of my mind for all those years.
"We all have a life we show. We have a life we hide and we have a life we quietly live. I think that's natural for anyone. There are people, personalities, who are more interested in the display than what is at the back of the house. Or, are more interested in what's in your mind and your heart and saying absolutely nothing and showing nothing.
We have a life we hide and we have a life we quietly live. I think that's natural for anyone.
"And yet, we are bound to be somehow engaged in all of these in some way or another. I was interested in Furlong, this central character, being a man who went to the back door and not the front door, which is what most of us did for most of our lives in this country."
Self-destructive heroism
"I think when we're having a bad day, we actually believe in the worst thing anyone has ever said to us. For somebody like Furlong, who had been bullied for years at school, I think probably the message there was, 'You'll come to nothing, you're a bastard child, you have no father and you're nobody and you don't know who you are.'
"I think that never really goes away. We didn't have therapy or anything like that for people, or certainly working class people didn't have access to any of that and probably wouldn't have spoken about it. When they did speak about it, they might have done so in the pub, and Furlong doesn't drink.
I see it as the story of someone who has stuck a knife in his own life.
"I think for him to have done something kind of astonishing was an act of self-destruction, seeing as he has five girls that he wants to go to school in that small town that is run by the Catholic Church.
"I think Furlong is hugely heroic. But, I mean, heroes in literature and heroes in life, they die. They don't come to good ends. They suffer. And certainly, people who were brave and went up against the Catholic Church in this country, they suffered horribly. So I see it as the story of someone who has stuck a knife in his own life — and everything he's worked for.
"That's just my interpretation of it. Just because I wrote it doesn't mean that I know what it's about. And I mean that most sincerely."
The tired battle of good versus evil
"People were hugely brutalized in this country by the Catholic Church. They were so far removed from any type of decency, they didn't even know what decency was anymore. And they were also rewarded financially for it.
"People get lost morally — and I mean truly lost. And then they hide behind a screen of morality which the church gives you to wear. It's very powerful. People become afraid of you, and look up to you.
I genuinely have no interest in judging anybody in any of my stories. I just leave it to the reader.
"I don't know where I would stop if I was allowed to do anything to another and was rewarded for it in a society that is misogynistic, where women are not powerful at all and are looked down upon. I genuinely have no interest in judging anybody in any of my stories. I just leave it to the reader. I leave it to the reader that is myself, also.
"I think Furlong could be just a very foolish fellow. I think the Mother Superior could just be a very ordinary woman who would do what anybody would do in her circumstances. I find the whole 'good and evil' opposition in narratives to be dull. I don't know if there are any duller stories than 'good versus evil' and the good winning out, because it usually doesn't.
"And it is never that simple."
Claire Keegan's comments have been edited for length and clarity.