Date Finished: April 13th 2024
This year I’ve been trying to break up my reading by balancing heftier tomes and denser works with some novellas, and it’s been working quite well. For someone with an attention span like mine, a shorter read offers the guarantee of quick completion and the sense that you’re not going to be chained to a book you might not like for weeks on end. Claire Keegan fit that criteria perfectly, a Booker shortlisted author whose novellas span few pages.
In Small Things Like These, coalman Bill Furlong finds himself inadvertently up against the Catholic Church when he unwittingly stumbles upon the Magdalen laundries, and is confronted with the dilemma of working out the Christian thing to do.
“What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”
Keegan packs a lot into a very short book, fleshing out Furlong’s character with impressive efficiency, and tying his background neatly into the novel’s main concerns, while still managing to evoke the cold of the Irish winter and the darkness underlying the tight-knit community. There are moments that really do linger quite expertly, as when Furlong opens the coalshed, or a particularly tense conversation inside the convent. Keegan’s economical prose gets the job done in a very short amount of time, proving surprisingly memorable in its meagre span.
And there’s not much more to say than that. A very quick, punchy little read, Keegan proves herself a powerful talent in a small package with Small Things Like These and whenever I want a brief read again, I’ll be sure to consider her.
7.5/10
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