Small Things Like These

I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These a couple of years ago. I watched the film produced and starring Cillian Murphy yesterday. “They” say films never live up to the book. I’m not sure I agree with whoever “they” are.

The book is a slight text. It took about an hour to read, but it stayed with me for so much longer. It won the Orwell Prize for Political fiction because it covers the big themes like the abuse of institutional power and women’s rights but through simple, individual story-telling that documents the political dilemma of how to be good.

It is set in 1980s Ireland in the small town of New Ross. It follows Bill Furlong’s family life a few days before Christmas, faced with the split between Christian values and religion’s institutional practices. It is about the cruelty of the Magdalene Laundries – a cruelty hidden in plain sight.

Books or films, art is an empathy generator.

For some empathy is best reached with words and for others with pictures or sounds. I am a visual reader. I see places and faces when I read. But I don’t have a full cinematic view all of the time, because the words matter. Sometimes a phrase is the beauty I need, without it having to evoke an image, just stating something true, raw, honest, honest, heartbreaking, delicate.

“It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.”

I have never been to the Republic of Ireland. This is an oversight on my part and something that surprises me. I went to various Catholic schools during my childhood. My pool of friends were drawn from the Irish migrant communities of Coventry and Sheffield. But the pictures I had of New Ross of the early 1980s after reading the book were reflected back to me in the film. Did I know what it looked like from previous visual representations? Did I understand rural poverty of that era from visiting relatives? Or had Keenan succinctly evoked it all in her writing?

There is a contrast between the historical age and the conditions. In the 1980s we had colour TV, cars, fashion and music. But there were homes and buildings that didn’t have central heating, windows misted, water gurgled through rickety pipes. But the garb of the laundrettes threw us back even further in time.

Cillian Murphy did not look like the Mr Furlong in my head. But he did look like a part of the landscape of the film. I hadn’t imagined such large, pretty eyes. But with sparse dialogue, those long lashes allowing a single tear at the barber said so much about his struggle to do the right thing. To be a good person.

The book and the film are about being a good person. They are about coldness and warmth. Reading the book I felt the cold. Watching the film I saw the breath in the mornings and the snow fall.

The film is about women. Women’s curtailment, harassment, attitudes, vulnerabilities, cruelties and fates are shown in their diversity, but all glimpsed and fretted upon by an orphaned boy grown to a father of daughters.

Words were few. They were used to warn, to threaten, not to connect.

Brevity can be impressive. It is easy to tell big stories through massive moments. In Small Things Like These, it does through a close focus on detail. Toppling institutions through an unspoken anger and an active kindness. There was something powerful in Bill Furlong’s lack of engagement with the argument and him just taking action to side with the sad and mistreated. Seeing his own fate in others.

Read the book and/or see the film.

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