'Small Things Like These': teaching notes 5
Fifth tranche of teaching notes on Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These in the light of the Comparative section of the Leaving Certificate, covering Section 7, from page 89 to the end on page 110 (pagination Faber UK paperback edition).
I will be giving a free webinar on the book for English teachers on the evening of Tuesday 10th September 2024: register.
Also in this series:
SECTION 7: PAGES 89 TO 110 (the end).
89: Furlong’s gathering sense of tension and crisis. ‘For days, something hard had been gathering on his chest.’ On page 108, we heard that he feels ‘light and tall’ walking with the girl, as if that burden has been lifted.
90: the lorry struggles on the hills, and Furlong knows that this means replacing the engine will stop them putting in the new windows Eileen wants for the front of their house. There is a cost for everything, a cost which might impact on your family, a lesson that we will see at its starkest in the closing pages of the book (108 - ‘the fact was that he would pay for it’). An economy that also struggles: customers are asking to delay payment, and Furlong leaves gifts of bags of logs 91; the girl whose mother is thankful she doesn’t have to buy a stamp for the card. But still he is guilty at not handing on his own gifts to the less well-off, and recognises his own relative ‘privilege’.
92: Christmas dinners in Kehoe’s, paid for by the yard. Mrs Kehoe’s correction to Furlong’s comment on days off: ‘What it is to be a man, and to have days off’ on 93, followed by her warning on 94 about the ‘run-in’ at the convent. He hasn’t seen the truth about women, and she worries he can’t see the truth about the Church’s power. Like Eileen, a ‘hugely practical woman’: her advice is to keep the enemy close, don’t assume the nuns have ‘only as much power as we give them.’ 94. Again he feels he is being regarded as ‘foolish’ 95. Furlong listens to Mrs Kehoe’s repeated warnings without a meaningful response, suggesting he will not in fact heed her warning. She points out that the Church is ‘all the one’, a monolithic power-structure, and on 106 Furlong remembers that, after deciding not to go to or trust the priests.
96: Furlong walks through the town, his work done for the year. 97: he goes into Mrs Stafford’s shop and asks for a 500-piece jigsaw of a farm, but she doesn’t have ones for adults. Again, we are moving in towards the completion of the jigsaw of his psyche.
98: at Joyce’s Furniture, yet another reflection, in the full-length mirror, which prompts him to go to the barber. 99: he looks in the barber’s mirror ‘searching for a resemblance to Ned, which he both could and could not see.’ He is getting to a point when he can see fully. He starts to think about Ned and imagine his point of view, the ‘act of grace’ that Furlong should ‘believe he had come from finer stock’. Now all the pieces of the jigsaw come together: Ned and Sarah went to mass together, ate together, he was ‘down-hearted’ at her early death, taught him how to shave and tie his laces: of course. It all makes sense now.
99: ‘Furlong found himself not joining in the talk’ and 101: ‘he found himself walking back down to the river’. The construction suggests his sub-conscious is animating him.
100: A key question: ‘Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?’ Think of how he had not ‘seen’ how much work women do, and Mrs Kehoe had to correct him. But more broadly, his failure to see who his father was is mirrored in society’s failure truly to see what is happening at the laundry, and nationally in mother and baby homes. We ‘knew’ but did not want to look or see. Here, my comparison between this book and Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: a personal history of Ireland since 1958:
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.
And O’Toole also writes near the end of his book -
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.
100-101+: images of the river, his own Rubicon, as he crosses the bridge: see my piece on this bridge in which I analyse the cover art, a selection from Bruegel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow (Winter)’. The story of the curse on it (three drownings a year); Furlong thinks of the girl who’d asked him to take her to it to drown.
103: his journey continues, past the better-off houses; images of other families.
104: he closes in on the convent (prison-like images), ‘feeling not unlike a nocturnal animal on the prowl and hunting’, and then the image of the ‘black cat eating from the carcass of a crow, licking her lips’. 105: he collects Sarah, and as they cross the river he sees the ‘stout-black river flowing darkly along’ and ‘a part of him [yet again] envied the Barrow’s knowledge of her course, how easily the water followed its incorrigible way, so freely to the open sea’. His journey is now not at all easy or free of cost/consequences. But he must make that journey.
106: already the cost (108 - ‘he would pay for it’) of what he has done - people he knows well flinch when they see the girl is not one of his daughters and that she is bare-footed (he is carrying Eileen’s Christmas present, a pair of shoes).
107: ‘A part of him considered backing off’ and taking the less public route, but his determination overrules this, his bravery.
108: As he gets closer to home, ‘he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?’ Can you ‘face yourself in the mirror?’ (reflection). But now, walking with the girl, there is ‘fresh, new, unrecognisable joy in his heart’. ‘Some part of him … was going wild’. Extraordinarily, this is even better than his own daughters’ births. There is both fear, and excitement.
109: the ‘small things’ Mrs Wilson had done, ‘which, when added up, amounted to a life’. He is doing what Mrs Wilson did, ‘saving’ a girl, and knows that ‘a world of trouble’ is waiting for him ‘behind the next door’. But he has to do this: ‘the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been.’ That is now the road not taken: inaction.
110: the book ends with another door to go through, his own, and he climbs the street to this challenge and uncertainty. He is afraid, recognises his ‘foolishness’ ( but ‘legitimately’ believes they will ‘manage’. What does the reader think? Will they?