Several weeks ago, there was a huge storm. It started in the afternoon and by night it was full-blown and terrible. The wind was howling like a billion banshees shrieking all around the house – wild and loud; the sea, driven by the wind, was rushing and raging – crashing great big rocks and bits of trees up the street at the front; and at the back, just behind where I live, the earth was literally opening – a sink hole was spreading into what the authorities later called ‘The Void’. The walkway and the seawall were collapsing on to the shore and into the sea. The houses were threatened; gardens disappeared; and the noise – the rumbling, growling, roaring of the crumbling earth – was dreadful.
So I stayed up all night. And I read this book. This beautiful book. This gentle, tender, beautiful book. It is Irish – and you can hear the lovely soft Irishness of it in the author’s voice, in the words she uses, her descriptions of the places and the people, and in the voices of the people. Her writing is superb.
The novel is set during the latter part of that shameful time in Irish history – the Magdalene Laundries. Told through the story of a man, the son himself of a single mother, it is full of love – and ordinariness. The love in his family life with his wife and daughters – and the ordinariness in the way of life lived by everybody in this little Irish town – run through it all, culminating in the days before Christmas in 1985 and finally on Christmas Day. We feel the freezing winter cold (Claire Keegan excels at descriptive weather!) and the counting of the pennies – and are aware of the undercurrent of the something else that no-one talks about.
It is a book about many things. But mostly it’s about day-to-day living – and that dark undercurrent – known of but not questioned. All told with gentle tenderness – leaving us, ultimately, with a Christmas present of that wonderful emotion – hope.
It’s a short book – only about 110 pages. It reads like an extended poem. I loved every single word of it. Every single thought in it. All of it. It is un-put-downable. I cannot recommend it enough.
It was, for me at least, a little island of hope in among the noise and disruption going on around me on that dreadful stormy night!
[We have a copy of Small Things Like These in the library]
Reviewed by a library member
