I’ll try to focus on Christmasy books reviews on the following days and this novella by Claire Keegan is a great start.
It’s 1985 in small town New Ross, Ireland, and our protagonist, Bill Furlong, is preparing for Christmas. He has a wife and five daughters and they barely make their ends meet; Bill runs his own coal business, but times are hard and it’s difficult enough to put food on the table, so warming houses is not a priority for many families. Bill is very sensitive to others’ difficult circumstances - he himself is the son of a unwed 16 year old servant girl, whose employer, Mrs. Wilson, was kind enough not to throw her out of the house and helped her when she got pregnant. So Bill was protected, in a way other illegitimate children of other single Irish mothers were not - and he tries to pay forward.
As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? 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?
This means Bill will accept late payments for his goods and services, which creates tension in his house. Eileen, his wife, is pragmatic. Their wedding and family life feels very real.
Bill is about to make an unscheduled pre-Christmas delivery at the local convent - a Magdalene Laundry - when he sees a restless woman in rags, locked at the coal shed overnight, apparently being punished. He accompanies her to the main building, and the nuns play it off as an accident - but Bill is not convinced. He understands that the girls in there are not just overworked but mistreated. As he goes about his way, he ponders on his life and upbringing (how his mother escaped that fate due to kindness) and how he cannot look away from the suffering of others - even when warned to do so.
Small Things Like These exposes both what those laundries actually were and the Catholic rule and abuses of power in Ireland as people keep telling Bill not to intervene. It is terrifying enough to think of these Magdalene Laundries in the 1980s, but truth is they were up and running until the mid 1990s, had State support, and even until today there is no real record of how many girls, women and babies went through this system and how many died. These girls and women were guilty of having sex or becoming pregnant without being married, but some of them were also just unwanted by their families. As such, they had to work for their stay at the convents - and conditions were harsh to put it lightly.
The book is very honest yet sensitive; it is both very subtle and powerful, however it never provides the reader with closure, as the ending is both open but also not very hopeful. Highly recomended - Christmas or not.
If you’re in Portugal, you can get a physical edition via wook, in Portuguese or in English.