Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan

As they walked on, Furlong met people he had known and dealt with for the greater part of his life, most of whom gladly stopped to speak until, looking down, they saw the bare, black feet and realised the girl with him was not one of their own. Some then gave them a wide berth or talked awkwardly or politely wished him a Happy Christmas and went on. One elderly woman out walking a terrier on a long strap confronted him, asking who the girl was, and was she not one of those wans from the laundry? At another point, a little boy looked at Sarah's feet and laughed and called her dirty before his father gave his hand a rough tug and told him to whisht. Miss Kenny, wearing old clothes he'd never before seen her in and with drink on her breath, stopped and asked what he was doing with a child out in the snow with no shoes on, assuming Sarah was one of his own, and marched off. Not one person they met addressed Sarah or asked where he was taking her. Feeling little or no obligation to say very much or to explain, Furlong smoothed things over as best he could and 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.

Times are tough in Ireland, but Bill Furlong is doing all right: he's got a thriving business delivering wood and coal; he's got a family, a wife and four daughters. It hasn't been easy for him, growing up as a poor orphan in the house of a woman who took pity on him, but despite his hardships, Furlong has achieved a hard-won security and stability. While making his rounds, he begins to notice the girls who staff the local church laundry look frightened and worn; they say things that seem shocking to him, a passing outsider. What Furlong has discovered is one of Ireland's now-infamous "Magdalen Laundries," which were essentially forced labor institutions that tortured young women considered to be "fallen." When he discovers one of them in the church's coal shed, exiled there in the dead of winter, he is faced with a choice between stability and his own powerful moral sense.

Small Things Like These is, first and foremost, a novel about goodness. Furlong is a deeply good person, shaped by his experiences of orphanhood and penury. Goodness, in this novel, mean seeing the the things that other people turn a blind eye to. Furlong's own wife chastises him for caring too much about the plight of others, when they have their own family to support and defend. "But what if it was one of ours?" he asks, to which she acerbically replies, "This is the very thing I'm saying... 'Tis not one of ours." Perhaps goodness, too, means expanding the arbitrary lines that demarcate whom you are responsible to, as Furlong remembers quite clearly being the kind of person who fell outside of any radius of obligation. The proprietor of the local tavern advises Furlong not to get involved; it's better to get along, and what can one do anyway? But Furlong sees, and will not deceive himself, and to see is to act.

Small Things Like These goes down smooth. Keegan's clear, plainspoken prose is like water, though it's touched with a bit of folksy Irish brogue for flair. It matches well the simple working-class life that Furlong leads. And the novel's moral vision is a compelling one. Yet to me, there's a kind of smell on it, the smell of an "issue novel"--a novel about the Magdalen Laundries--that the language is unable to wash away. A smell of falseness, maybe. Probably that's not fair, but it's what I felt. And I felt, too, something that's rare in my experience with SHORT BOOK FEBRUARY: I wish there had been more of it. The moral arc of the novel--Furlong ponders whether to act, then acts--is too clean. The novel's high point comes when Furlong, having rescued the girl Sarah from the coal shed, walks her through a Christmastide gauntlet of local faces who do not yet quite understand what it is he's done. We understand that the life he's chosen is the harder one, that it will be difficult to explain why Sarah is in his home--to the church, to the police, to his wife--but that he will fight for her, because he's not a man who sees any other choice. I found myself wanting to read that novel, and I wondered if the book didn't let him off a little too easy.