![]() For example, as winter deepens over the town: Keegan’s concise, precise images do evocative character- and world-building work, the dourness of the town’s atmosphere placed in relief against Furlong’s gentleness and warm family life. On one level, the book works as the portrait of a good man, its protagonist Bill Furlong: a coal and timber merchant, and husband and father of five daughters. Small Things Like These is set in the town of New Ross in the mid-1980s, in the ‘raw times’ of Ireland’s economic depression. ![]() In this vein, Claire Keegan’s Booker prize-shortlisted and Orwell Prize-winning novella Small Things Like These powerfully dissects the Church’s recent history of abusive treatment of women and children. In contrast, the older generation of Irish novelists is more concerned with ‘autopsying the dead society’ of ‘Holy Catholic Ireland’, as Fintan O’Toole has described it. ![]() Immersed in the contemporary settings of her novels, it’s easy to forget the control that the Catholic Church once exercised over Ireland. In the cosmopolitan Ireland of blockbuster millennial novelist Sally Rooney, the main issues are capitalism and class rather than religion and religious institutions. In Claire Keegan’s novella of Ireland in the 1980s, a good man faces a testing decision. ![]()
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