Small Things Like These has been quietly receiving critical accolades galore since its publication and has been shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio prize. I, however, am a person of extremely poor taste and discernment, because I neither liked it, nor understand what’s supposed to be so great about it.
Set during the harsh winter of 1985, it is about Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small Irish town, who becomes aware that nuns may not be good people. And that’s pretty much it.
Small Things Like These is a short book, so it’s impossible to discuss it without “spoilers”, but as it’s literary fiction, nobody is here for the plot. We’re here for the depth, and the character, and the writing. We’re here to think about stuff.
I did not, personally, care for the writing. Others have enthused about the atmosphere and evocative descriptions, but I, who know New Ross – the small town on the Wexford, Waterford, Kilkenny border where the book is set – did not find it so. It felt generic to me; an idea of what a small place in rural Ireland looks like, not what this specific town feels like. It read like what we have collectively decided “good writing” is.
I wanted the damp steaming fug of the post office and the bank; the way the chimney smoke and mist becomes trapped in the river valley so you can stand in full sunlight in the Irishtown and be unable to make out the bridge down the hill ahead of you; I wanted the river which flows in both directions depending on the tide, and which feels like a gift to a literary writer concerning themselves with morality.
Instead I got the “stout-coloured” River Barrow, and the namecheck of Hanrahan’s Shoe Shop, and references to the town hall rather than the Tholsel. I got characters standing in the town square, but not the fact that a road runs through it, or its darkness, or the struggle of the vehicles to get up the hill in the snow. And although Ross had a Magdalene laundry, Small Things Like These is not the story of it, in attempt or in attainment: Keegan’s convent is placed over the river beside what the book renames St Margaret’s School. Even the UK edition’s cover image, although lovely, is by Bruegel.
And this is not 1985 Ireland by a long way – you could probably remove fewer than a hundred words and claim it to be Frank McCourt’s Limerick. The dialogue, at times, feels performatively Oirish, all ‘Tis, and Sure, and various other linguistic quirks that, with the limited dialogue, leave it feeling like something cynically designed to appeal to those who drink green beer for Patrick’s rather than an accurate reflection of how people speak. If the book had been longer, I probably would have rage quit when the Mother Superior responds to Furlong’s apology for leaving tracks on the floor with “No matter. Where there’s muck, there’s luck.”
It is best to think of this book as a fable – and if it was marketed that way, I wouldn’t have picked it up because I like stories, not fables. I like things that are fresh, and that surprise me, and that make me feel something. I do not like things that stop at the moment they feel they are beginning to get going, and, to be honest, I think this book would have worked far better if it had forgone the tacked on Magdalene laundry aspect to focus purely on Bill Furlong.
Theo Malings 
Leave a comment