Book Review: Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

Book Review: Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

Read: 30/04 -17/05/2023

My rating: 4 /5 stars

Book of 2023: 4 

It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces his busiest season. As he goes round the houses making deliveries, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church. 

I’ve never read a book like this before. We’re sat in rural Ireland, in the past, in the head of a hard-working family man. We’re not sure where we’re going, or where we’ll end up. We experience the worries of a protagonist who is stuck with his lot: at times hopeless, at times admirable. 

Good book, short book. Unlike any I’ve ever ready before, really. I wasn’t enamoured of it, but I think it was because of the stickiness inside the head of our protagonist. Keegan creates an alluring atmosphere, and you feel the cold Irish wind coming out of the page. Short and sweet, and each line is carefully chosen. Impactful and it remains with you long after you’ve closed its pages. 

I'm pretty sure they're making a film or series with Cillian Murphey in so I'm looking forward to seeing how they pull that together. I'd definitely read more of Claire Keegan's work.

Lines I highlighted:

In October there were yellow trees. (1)

Soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. (1)

And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors (2)

The men sat down to thaw out and eat their fill before having a smoke and facing back out into the cold again. (3)

He’d stand at the window then with the cup in his hand, looking down at the streets and what he could see of the river, at the little bits and pieces of goings on (12)

Magically, then, the streets seemed to change and come alive under the long strands of multi-coloured bulbs which swayed, pleasantly, in the wind above their heads. (16)

Soft little splashes of applause (16-17)

Like a child she was, sitting up in the bed, gazing out the window, a flowery nightgown buttoned to her chin. (21)

It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper. (22)

Wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset (25)

He was touching forty but he didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for. (33)

The convent was a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river with black, wide-open gates and a host of tall, shining windows, facing the town. (37)

A fog was coming down, hovering in long sheets and patches (43)

It felt as though the room was closing in; the wallpaper with its repetitive, nonsensical pattern was coming before his eyes. (79)

Sundays could feel very threadbare, and raw. (81)

Always, christmas brought out the best and the worst in people. (91)

‘What it is to be a man,’ she said, ‘and to have days off.’ (93)

She paused then and looked at him the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys. (94-5)

For a while, he simply walked along the quayside with his hands deep in his pockets, thinking over what he’d been told and watching the river flowing darkly along, drinking the snow. (96)

His mind was freeing up now, given pause to stray and roam (100)

Carried on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see but knew he would encounter. (107)

The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this (108-9)

His fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he had not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage. (110)