On Claire Keegan and Fintan O'Toole
They are two of the finest books by Irish writers published in 2021.
One is just 110 widely-spaced pages long, a work of fiction by a woman whose output over many years has been spare and careful, concentrating on just a few winter weeks in the life of a small-town fuel merchant.
The other is a big beast, 600 thrillingly-detailed pages by a prolific male journalist and literary critic which stitches together personal and public history, and covers his and the country’s life all the way since 1958.
But despite these differences they have a meeting place, intersecting in Ireland of the mid-1980s, specifically in the idea of what we ‘knew’ or refused to accept we knew. Both are beautifully written books by highly intelligent authors that tell us a lot about what we were, from the perspective of what we are now.
I have already written about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and started that piece with this quotation from late on in the story:
Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?
Keegan’s novel tells the story of the psychological journey of Furlong, a good man, as he has to come to terms with a discovery in the local convent, a story which has echoes in his own disturbed upbringing. His heroism, possibly at the expense of his own family, is constructed out of his determination to look at one of the darkest truths of Irish society, not to turn away from what he sees, and to act on what he now knows.
Fintan O’Toole’s central thesis about that same society over the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st is encapsulated in the title of his book, We Don’t Know Ourselves. So often we have suppressed our knowledge - of truths, just for a start about abortion, about a corrupt Taoiseach, about clerical child abuse. We ‘knew’ about these things, but chose not to accept that knowledge, unlike Furlong, who at the end of Keegan’s book takes responsibility, potentially at great personal cost.
In Chapter 24 of We Don’t Know Ourselves, ‘Foetal Attractions’, O’Toole starts with a personal story: in 1976, an 18 year-old student at UCD, he was asked by a male friend for information about getting the latter’s 16 year-old sister an abortion in England:
What was I supposed to do? Get up and storm out in a show of moral outrage? … Or sit there and squirm and stammer out the quite truthful answer that I knew sweet damn all about any of this stuff? Or try somehow to be of use, to help the girl get this thing done so that after the school holidays, she could just turn up in class like everyone else, study for her Leaving Cert and get on with her life? It’s at moments like this, when you find yourself under pressure to make a choice you are not prepared for, that your hidden instincts reveal themselves.
He passed on information, and heard no more, only knowing that the girl was not pregnant by the time school resumed:
That was the way things were done.
Later in that chapter he turns to the subject that stains our recent history: the Mother and Baby Homes, including the Tuam scandal uncovered by Catherine Corless, and then other notorious events come at us in quick succession in the chapters which follow: GUBU (the subject of a fascinating Irish Times podcast recently), Bishop Eamonn Casey, the abuser Ivan Payne, the Kerry Babies (just a year before Small Things Like These, which takes place in New Ross in 1985). Keegan’s dedication is
To the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries.
and on the next page she quotes the 1916 Proclamation in its noble and frequently-neglected resolution
To pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally.
What follows is a narrative masterpiece, driven by the psychic tensions also explored by Fintan O’Toole, but here compressed into a single-strand story (one which apparently was redrafted 41 times).
As I wrote in my earlier piece, Furlong is beset by restlessness and anxiety (the strain of being alive). A charged object in his life is the jigsaw he asked for one Christmas, and
Like a jigsaw, his life is fractured, and never securely whole. He is all too aware of its fragility, both financial and emotional, and how close everyone is to disaster. He is aware both of how fortunately his own life has turned out and of how it might have been different.
He constantly questions himself:
What was it all for? … Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.
At the end of the book the choice he makes is in a sense inevitable: if he does not take it, the days will be for nothing.
Early on, Keegan holds her nerve. It is not until Chapter 4 that the true subject of the book sidles into view, with a brilliant paragraph that starts with a curt, ominous statement:
It was a December of crows.
This is followed by a free-wheeling sentence starting People had never seen the likes of them which arrives at the end in the word ‘convent’, a place now already overshadowed by images of scavenging birds. The next paragraph echoes the description of Tom Buchanan’s mansion in The Great Gatsby, both places from which power is exercised (it is a powerful–looking place, a sly play on that Hiberno-English coinage). The people of the town talk about the place and its attendant business:
Little was known about the training school, but the laundry had a good reputation.
Little may be known, but there is ‘talk’ and ‘reports’ and ‘claims’:
A good half of what was said could not be believed, and indeed Furlong didn’t like to believe any of it.
And just there is the story: he does not like to believe any of it, but eventually he has to, for his own integrity. When he leaves the convent after that first time he asks for directions from an old man slashing thistles, who tells him
This road will take you wherever you go, son.
He returns home, and his wife Eileen tries to dampen his curiosity about the place. He asks her What is it you know? but she tells him That such things had nothing to do with them. Like Lady Macbeth, tells her too-soft husband Consider it not so deeply. Macbeth is aware of the dangers: To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself but then disastrously suppresses this knowledge to try to save himself; Furlong opens it up to save himself. It might be ‘best’ not to know himself, but unlike so many people in our history, he is prepared to look at what is hiding in plain sight.
On his walk back to the convent at the end of the book, as Furlong crosses the stout-black river (his Rubicon), and thinks of its certitude, he
envied the Barrow’s knowledge of her course, how easily the water followed its incorrigible way, so freely to the open sea.
He feels his self-preservation and courage battling against each other and considers taking his charge to the priest’s house, but he knows deep down that the priests are complicit, part of the same abusive system of power as the nuns:
Several times, already, his mind had gone on ahead, and had concluded the priests already knew … They’re all the one.
That is Fintan O’Toole’s vision too: it was all one, and we knew or we should have known that. Close to the end of the book, after quoting Keats’s famous statement about negative capability, he suggests that
Maybe Ireland has reached the point of accepting that half-knowledge - the ability to see clearly what is, while also acknowledging what remains dark - is better than the swinging between the pretence of knowing everything and the denial of what you really do know.
In their examinations of that journey and of how we may have reached that point, from two utterly different angles, these books are essential reading.
END
Also: a post on the cover of Small Things, looking at a significant detail in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Hunters in the Snow (Winter)’.