Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2022, is a fitting December read – a quiet yet powerful book set in the lead-up to Christmas which is short enough to read in snatched moments between festivities. Once you’ve read it, you can also go and see its newly released film adaptation, produced by and starring Cillian Murphy. And if you can’t get enough of Keegan’s razor-sharp fiction after that, there are plenty of other stories by the acclaimed Irish author to try. Novelist Megan Nolan suggests some good places to begin.
Photograph: Faber
The entry point
A child narrator is one of the most difficult voices a writer can convincingly pull off. How to access the necessary insight without veering into jarring precocity, or – worse – a voice characterised by cloying naivety whose ignorance of the things it describes is meant to lend the story unearned profundity? In Foster, Keegan is able to give her narrator an organic watchfulness which never contradicts the sort of language and observation natural to childhood. It was published first as a short story in 2009, when it received the Davy Byrnes short story award, later as a novella in 2022, when it was also adapted into a film. Its events take place during a single summer in which a young girl in rural Wexford leaves her family home, where her mother struggles with another unplanned pregnancy, and is cared for by a childless couple, John and Edna Kinsella. Keegan illuminates the more subtle dignities of being cared for and indignities of absence and neglect, homing in on small moments a lesser writer would not bother to dwell on.
The one that stands out
Keegan’s short story Surrender is notable for taking explicit influence from John McGahern, that other great Chekhovian chronicler of Irish rurality. In McGahern’s Memoir, we see his father – an abusive, tyrannical policeman – devour dozens of oranges in one binge, a final flamboyant gesture of self-indulgence (or is it self-punishment?) before he is compelled to accept the demand for marriage made of him by his girlfriend. Surrender takes this same dark feast and ekes it out into an viscerally unsettling scene. Sean, the child of the shopkeeper from whom he buys the fruit, is obviously coveting his bounty. He stands before Sean intentionally, opening each orange with vivid, sensuous enjoyment, the better to taunt him. Again it is Keegan’s keen feeling for the rights and wrongs experienced by children which makes this story so odd and moving.
Zara Devin and Cillian Murphy in the 2024 film adaptation of Small Things Like These. Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy
The one that deserves more attention
The title story of Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, is a grand example of her ability to take narratives that might be dismissed as tropes of the provincial Irish experience, and render them with such precision and apparent ease that they are like nothing else. Here we have the story of a Catholic priest’s affair, and his unwillingness to break vows to be with his beloved. Called to officiate the woman’s wedding, what unfolds is a painful, elegiac reflection on the pleasures and pains of memory and an amusingly observed glimpse of the at times oddly theatrical and rote verbal conventions of Irish social life.
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The one you’ll learn from
All of Keegan’s work is remarkable for its simplicity and brevity, but So Late in the Day may follow the simplest trajectory of all in light of what it manages to convey. The story came about, Keegan said in a Guardian interview, during a creative writing class she was teaching as a hypothetical example of how a story with few overtly dramatic interventions can reveal its tension and potency through ostensibly unremarkable events. Cathal leaves his office in Dublin on a Friday evening and travels home by bus, avoiding his phone and the repercussions which await him there, the fallout of a relationship with his French fiancee Sabine. Titled “Misogynie” in its French translation, this is a startling revelation of a story which lays bare a particular strand of Irish male disdain for women.
The masterpiece
Since its publication in 2021, I have noticed Small Things Like These being given as a Christmas gift in Ireland, and over the holidays being passed through families once one member has finished it. Its length – the shortest ever book to be in contention for the Booker prize – means it has the satisfying benefit of being possible to read in one sitting. More importantly, it lays out in spare but tender prose a crucial tension at the heart of Irish society, what Fintan O’Toole calls “unknown knowns” – those parts of our history which were unhidden yet unacknowledged, including the brutal institutions run by the state and the church around which this book revolves. Bill Furlong is a decent and content family man, a coal merchant in New Ross, who becomes unable to turn away from the realities of the convent on the edge of town when he comes across a delirious, suffering young woman in a shed asking to see the baby which has been taken from her. Brutal on the complicity of ordinary people in one way, it is also an especially tender and hopeful Keegan work in another.
- A new gift edition of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
