From the start, this novella was so enchanting that I only dreaded how small and slim it was, meaning the read would not last very long at all. I do not hesitate to say already from the first chapter, I was making mental notes to look up other Claire Keegan books.
This novel is set in the 1980s in an Irish town, and our protagonist is Furlong, a fatherless then orphaned boy who has made good. He has a good wife, 5 bright daughters, and a thriving business, and seems such a tender father: when his youngest daughter is frightened of Santa Claus, he reassures her
’There’s no need to go if you don’t want, a leanbh,’ Furlong told her, ‘Stay here with me.” But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.
p17
The Irish words and phrases are also charming, ‘a leanbh’ as an endearment, meaning child/infant; “Stinott was stotious at the phone box” (p11), ‘stotious’ meaning drunk; and when his wife, Eileen, asked Furlong if he gave a lift to a little boy, “’I suppose you stopped?’”, Furlong replies with a question that is not a question and which is so typical of how they speak there, “Wasn’t it spilling rain” (p10). Furlong saying, “There’s a hurry on me” (p61) indicating he was in a rush; Eileen saying, “I don’t know why I put the [Christmas] cake on the long finger. There wasn’t another woman I met there this evening who hadn’t hers made” (p27), which was her way of saying she had postponed or put off making the cake. On entering a shop, Furlong buys a bag of lemon jellies which he did not need, because “he did not like to go back out with one arm as long as the other” (p98) – which apparently usually means turning up empty handed, but in this case, seems more along the lines of not disappointing or doing less than expected. The language – both the use of words as well as sentence construction – is what gives the story such a strong sense of its place and time and community.
Delivering coal to the convent, Furlong accidentally sees things which don’t quite add up, where the young girls there are concerned. He almost tries not to see, but his honesty makes him understand his own hypocrisy. It is Christmas eve when he finally has a little time to himself, and we follow him as he wraps up his busy year, communicates with customers and employees and colleagues who all clearly like him very much, and steels himself to do what is right by the girls forced to work in the laundries although it is going to cost him everything he holds dear, and cost his family too. For once in a way, the inside front cover blurb has it exactly right when it calls this a story of “quiet heroism and tenderness” – that is this beautiful novel in a nutshell. It is such a short novel, more a short story than a novel, but so beautifully crafted, so touching in its simplicity. Please write more, Claire Keegan, lots and lots more!
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