[This is a 2021 novella. I wrote about the first few chapters, then read the last two and wrote about those. Spoiler alert: I have described everything that happens in the book, right to the end.]
1 October 2023
Chapters 1-5
From the opening lines, we know where we are, kind of. This is Ireland, and the raw, unforgiving wind could be blowing in any November in living memory. We’re in New Ross, wherever that is—in fact it’s a small port not far from the south coast—and we’re with Bill Furlong in the yard of his coal and log delivery yard. He’s fretting about needing new tyres for his lorry, because he’s always got something to worry about, and… and, Claire Keegan isn’t letting us know that this book, not very much longer than Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in The Dubliners, isn’t really an attempt merely to offer a convincing version of a different time and place from our own. She’s very good at that, but she’s doing something else at the same time. She has set out to pose a ‘what if?’ question. What if, in a typical Irish town nearly a decade before the scandal broke, an ordinary man discovered that the local convent housed one of the infamous Magdalene laundries? He doesn’t recognise it for what it is, of course, but Claire Keegan has already sown some dark seeds of suspicion and concern in his mind. What’s he going to do about it?
But that comes later, in Chapters 4 and 5. Before that, Keegan carefully lays the ground. I don’t think it feels like that as we read although, looking back, it’s possible to see the clues. In Chapter 2 comes Furlong’s back-story. A reader who has avoided any information about the book’s main theme will notice that his mother, having ‘fallen pregnant,’ is treated with unusual kindness by her employer Mrs Wilson. The girl, only sixteen, is employed as a maid in one of the big houses locally—and Mrs Wilson does not do what almost all employers in her position do. Instead of sending her packing, she lets her stay and have the child, and she has the boy brought up in the house. Much later—his mother had died suddenly when he was only twelve—she had set him up with enough money to buy out and build up the local coal and wood supply business.
There’s a detail about the religious practice in the house, which Keegan draws our attention to. Mrs Wilson is nominally a Catholic and attends mass every week—but leaves her bible in the hall when she comes home and only picks it up again the following Sunday. Furlong’s mother also goes to mass, but at the (presumably lower-status) chapel. Which is the extent of her own faith, too. It’s the first point, together with the woman’s kindness, that sets the reader thinking. Mrs Wilson’s charitable behaviour has nothing to do with the mere forms of religion—to put it simply, this is how people in a civilised society ought to behave. And if readers have read the blurb, they are already comparing this with what they know about the Magdalene laundries. By the time Furlong sees inside the convent for the first time in Chapter 4, he’s much more shocked than we are.
We know before being told about this that something is gnawing away at the back of his mind. There’s Eileen, his hardworking wife, and five daughters who all seem to be doing well at school… so what is that lurking anxiety he feels as autumn turns to a freezing winter? Why does the business seem so precarious to him, when he’s built it up from almost nothing and it’s always done well enough? Why does he look at his growing daughters so doubtfully, worried not so much about how they are now as what lies in front of them? Why, at the age of nearly forty, does it all seem a little pointless to him? He even worries about Eileen, whose life is exactly like his own. What should be a glorious day of Christmas preparations—the lights on in town, the cake prepared and mixed by all of them, letters to Santa ready to be posted—becomes a focus for all his doubts.
In fact, we’re pretty sure we know by now. ‘One day’—we don’t know when, but we later find out it wasn’t long ago—he’d had to go up to the convent. Nothing unusual in that, except he goes round to the garden and is intrigued by the neatness of the orchard. Everything is orderly and well-kept as he goes nearer… But geese chase him out, and he notices a chapel. Inside are a dozen girls, all wearing shapeless grey shifts, and most of them with messy, badly cut hair. He doesn’t get it, but we do. The girls are on their hands and knees ‘polishing their hearts out in circles the floor’—and later, the almost fanatical cleanliness of the convent becomes a theme….
It’s about now that the idea of this being a ‘what if?’ thought experiment occurred to me. Keegan has had to get her man deep inside the citadel to prepare him for what comes a little later, during his second visit. But now, on seeing him in the chapel, the girls look ‘as if they’d been scalded’ and immediately look down to the floor. Except one approaches and pleads with him to help her. Or can he at least let her out so she can go to the river? Or can he take her home to skivvy for him? He can’t, obviously, and anyway he has his own girls. ‘I’ve nobody,’ she says, ‘and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?’ She suddenly drops to her knees to start polishing again, and Furlong realises there’s someone behind him. The Mother Superior ignores what has happened, makes him feel slightly abashed by mentioning the embarrassing geese incident, and deals with the docket he’s brought. She lets him know who’s in charge, something she’s very used to.
He leaves and drives away. But… he’s so bemused he misses his turn and loses his way completely. What happens next makes me pretty certain that everything in the novella so far has been carefully orchestrated to make Furlong realise he isn’t only lost on his way to the coalyard. A fog descends, he has no idea where he is, but sees somebody ahead. Does the old man know where the road leads to? ‘This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.’ And for a moment it feels as if we’re in Pilgrim’s Progress.
Maybe we are, because that night Furlong seeks guidance from the only person in the world he can ask. He talks to Eileen, but she has turned into another character from a tale: ‘she sat up rigid and said such things had nothing to do with them, and there was nothing they could do, and….’ And so on. ‘It was a long speech,’ and Furlong is puzzled. ‘What is it you know?’ he asks, and she carries on, deflecting any further questions. Which, as soon as we read about it, goes some way towards explaining his anxieties and doubts of recent weeks. His wife might be able to turn her attention away from whatever is going on, but he can’t. And his persistence unsettles her so much she makes some uncharacteristically barbed remarks about his own background. She accuses him of being too soft-hearted, then: ‘Wasn’t it far from any hardship you were reared?’
Ah. We know what she’s referring to, and remember back to how he had been made to feel as a child. It’s an old wound, and he rarely thinks about the prejudice of almost anybody who knew his story. And she’s opened it up again. She later apologises, but it doesn’t stop her being the personification of conventional, keep-your-head-down attitudes. Like so many, she looks for a justification of her existence through hard work. So does Bill Furlong—except, suddenly, it isn’t enough. (While I’m on the subject of characters from morality tales… isn’t Mrs Wilson just like Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-done-by in The Water Babies?)
That was some time ago. December is colder than ever, and Furlong is kept so busy he needs to make a delivery to the convent on the Sunday before Christmas. By now, we’re waiting for whatever is going to set more bells ringing, and something does. The first book he had ever received at Christmas was A Christmas Carol. He’s bitterly disappointed that it isn’t the jigsaw he’d been longing for—during the Christmas baking day he’d pretended to his youngest daughter, the one he worries most about, that he did receive it—but, by the following Christmas he’d read all about the redemption of Scrooge and loved it. We think we know who the Scrooges are in this book…
…and we’re right. What Furlong finds, as he goes to the coal store, is a bolted outhouse door. And when he realises that there’s a living, breathing girl in there, almost dead from the cold after a night locked in… I thought of the children who live beneath the long cloak of the Spirit of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol: ‘meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing.’ Scrooge is told by the spirit that the boy is Ignorance. The girl, of course, is Want.
But there’s nobody to tell Furlong what to think—except a nun, who screams and leaves, and the suave, well-fed Mother Superior. What comes next looks like a well-practised routine. It’s like those dictatorships in which foreign visitors are given a view of the country that is nothing but theatre. Happy citizens greet them in prosperous surroundings… and so on. What Furlong is given is a cynical charade of concern and comfort. What had the silly girl been doing out there? She must go upstairs for a hot bath and clean clothes, while Furlong settles his bill in the Mother Superior’s well-furnished and comfortable office. The Mother Superior gives him his Christmas tip, as though to send him on his way. He is taken through the kitchen, where a nun is preparing a delicious-looking breakfast, as the girl is ‘sitting in a kind of daze at the table, with nothing before her.’
What to do? They want him out, clearly, but he stays and talks to her. He finds things out about her, and that the girls aren’t known by their real names. She is Enda in the convent—a boy’s name, as he points out—but, when he presses her, she tells him her real name. It’s a genuinely moving moment, as we recognise this poor, abused child and the bland cruelty of the Mother Superior. Furlong tells her his name and the coal yard address, and that she must send for him if she needs anything. He leaves as the breakfast is being put on a plate, but he doesn’t see it being given to the girl. And as he leaves, he recognises something else he’s already noticed about this place—the sound of the door being locked behind him.
What’s he going to do? We know how a kind upbringing has made Furlong a good man. He wants to do the right thing—but what is the right thing? And will he be able to do it?
3 October
Chapters 6 and 7—to the end
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the wee donkey. Did I see that coming? Nope. Is Furlong going to blow the whistle on Dothegirls Hall? Not exactly. Is it A Christmas Carol? In a way, but not quite. Furlong’s mind is in turmoil after his Sunday morning visit. He goes home, is so out-of-sorts that Eileen is slightly annoyed—Keegan is very good at showing the cracks in the perpetual uneasy truce of their marriage—and, when she makes a joke about the money for the collection at second mass, he shows his irritation. He doesn’t even go up for communion, later hating himself for his hypocrisy when that poor girl is suffering. It’s a thing with him: he always sees how he falls short of doing the right thing—we see at least two more little things he wishes he’d done but didn’t, remarking to himself that Christmas can bring out the worst in people as well as the best. Perhaps he isn’t only talking about himself, but he’s too aware of his own faults to unambiguously criticise anybody else’s. (Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the wee donkey really do make an appearance, and it’s at a significant time. Tell you later.)
Where was I? Furlong’s long Sunday afternoon and evening stretch before him. They’ve done the tree, put the decorations up and, of course, Eileen wants to do more baking. This time it’s mince pies, icing the Christmas cake, making a trifle… and to Furlong it’s all dust and ashes. He needs to get out, offers to see Ned, the servant and chauffeur who still lives at the big house even though Mrs Wilson is long dead. Eileen is slightly put out, but it’s right to go and see Ned, she admits, and gives him half-a-dozen mince pies to take.
Keegan interrupts herself to insert a flashback of a much earlier visit, when his oldest girl was only a baby. We see how they always got on well—Ned had always been there when Furlong was growing up—and Ned tells a story that turns into a sort of confession. We’ve always suspected something about who Furlong’s father might be—but this isn’t what he’s confessing to. In fact, says Ned, there were always well-to-do young men, Mrs Wilson’s friends and family over from England—who knows whose arms his mother fell into, he wonders. The confession is about when he was given the fright of his life as he was taking hay of Mrs Wilson’s to give to a friend of his for his ailing donkey. Some inhuman creature without hands had emerged from the ditch at night, and terrified him. (Don’t blame me, I’m not the one making this up.)
Back to Sunday evening. Ned isn’t at the house—he hasn’t been well, and he’s been somewhere (where?) for two weeks or more. The woman who answers the door, a stranger to him, wonders if Furlong is Ned’s nephew. There’s something of a likeness, she suggests—and he muses later how it takes a stranger to notice these things. (Really, Claire?) What to do? He wishes he didn’t have to get through the remaining hours of evening, so he could get on with a busy, ordinary Monday morning. That will be Christmas Eve, and he looks forward both to finishing off the pre-Christmas jobs, and to finishing early and treating his men to a big afternoon dinner. But now he parks on the bridge over the river—he remembers the girl in the chapel, and what she had wanted to do there—and envies it its unchanging course to where it’s bound for. He remembers back to the old man in the fog, and what he’d said to him about where the road would take him. But where’s that, exactly?
Fast-forward to Monday’s afternoon dinner at Mrs Keogh’s bar. The morning had gone as he knew it would, but he finds it hard to join in with the usual talk, and is even more unsettled by the quiet word the landlady has with him as he settles up with her after they’ve eaten. His ‘run-in’ at the convent is common knowledge by now, he realises, and she strongly advises him that there’s nothing to be done, to let it lie. ‘They’re all one,’ she says, and she means the whole Church hierarchy. Everybody puts up with it—we remember Eileen when he’d first mentioned it to her—because what can you do?
It’s worse and worse for him. He wanders around the town, looking into shop windows, paying for the nice patent leather shoes Eileen wanted for Christmas…. He goes for a haircut, and isn’t sorry that there’s a long queue. It gives him more time to avoid going home—and we realise he can hardly bear the idea of Christmas with this nagging sense of not having done the right thing for once in his life.
Have you guessed yet? After the haircut—and maybe other perambulations, I can’t remember any more than he probably can—he finds his way to the convent. And he finds the bolted door he had found yesterday morning, and prays not that it will be deserted, but that the girl will be there again. He had promised her he would find out about her baby, and is racked with guilt that he has done nothing. And, reader, there she is. Dirty and with bare feet, she accepts the overcoat he offers her and they start to walk. Where to? Wherever, it takes him along all the usual streets of the town, where some people speak to him almost as normal, but entirely ignoring the girl, while others are content with a muttered greeting, as if they would happily ignore them both. They pass the crib in the square, now with the Christ child and the Three Kings in place—but it’s the poor little donkey the girl coos over.
Small things. A working man in an out-of-the-way town can’t change the world—but he doesn’t have to be satisfied with just looking after his own. That’s for everybody else, including Eileen and Mrs Keogh. But the only idea he can come up with is this single act of kindness. He’s been thinking about Mrs Wilson’s lifelong kindness to him, and Ned’s in letting him believe he was from better stock… and where it will all lead is out of his hands. He’s no Scrooge, but his refusal to face a Christmas Day as constricted by guilt as the last two days redeems him. And, I suppose, Keegan is expecting us to contemplate what his little act of kindness—in fact, a huge act of defiance, as he well knows—is going to have. Keegan isn’t presenting any of this long walk as stream-of-consciousness. All she presents are his actions, and his continuing sense that he is only doing what he has to do.
The last sentence is a long one. ‘Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.’ Legitimately believed? Maybe, but he’s right to be scared. And we can be absolutely sure that he has no regrets.
We can read it for you wholesale 