A sad Irish Christmas story
Apr. 10th, 2024 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileIt’s April, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still Sad Irish Literature Month! March is only so long, after all.
After watching An Cailín Ciúin I decided I should check out some Claire Keegan. She is apparently a favorite of recent Oscar winner and celebrated Corkman Cillian Murphy, who is also the star of an adaptation of her novella Small Things Like These, which premiered at Berlinale a few weeks ago and has not hit theatrical release yet. I am grumpy that I cannot watch this movie, but I can read the novella, so I did.
This story is about the Magdalene laundries and it starts off very pointedly with an excerpt from the Proclamation of 1916, specifically quoting the bit about guaranteeing religious and civil liberties and cherishing all the children of the nation equally. I knew going into it that this was a story about how monstrously Ireland failed at upholding that ideal in the first eight decades or so of its existence (or arguably, all of it up until 2018, depending on whether you want to mark the abortion referendum or the closing of the last Magdalene laundry as the date upon which it entered modern morality), and also I have this exact text hanging on my wall, but I still found it emotionally effective.
Small Things Like These is more or less of the non-genre genre people call “general fiction,” where it isn’t a mystery or a western or a romance or sci-fi or anything like that, just a story about more or less contemporary people doing basically believable things. This is, to be frank, not a type of book I read much of! You could maybe call this historical fiction a little if you want to count 1985 as historical, which I feel a bit weird about doing. But at any rate it is sort of a slice-of-life novella except life in 1980’s Ireland meant living right on top of some very nasty institutions that everybody pretended were basically fine and surely all the things you heard about them were just gossip.
Our protagonist here is a forty-year-old man named Bill Furlong, the illegitimate son of a single mother who had had the good fortune to be employed by an independently well-off (or at least self-sufficient) Protestant woman of kind character and less judgmental sexual morals than the prevailing Catholic ethos of the times. This meant that instead of being adopted out to Americans or Australians or somebody, Bill was allowed to be raised by his mother, who retained her live-in employment as a domestic at Mrs. Wilson’s. Thus, Bill had more or less three parental figures–his mother; the paternal farmhand, Ned; and the grandmotherly Mrs. Wilson, who encouraged him to read and study and look up words in the dictionary and generally be of quiet Protestant work ethic type habits, and who gave him some money to get started up with when he got married. As a result, Bill survived the taunts of his schoolmates about as unscathed as anybody in mid-century Ireland managed to be and worked his way up in a coalyard from wage laborer to coal merchant, securing a reasonably safe and modern lifestyle for himself, his wife Eileen, and eventually their five daughters.
Bill mostly keeps his head down and works and has only the occasional bouts of existential philosophizing and restlessness, usually thinking about what he has to do tomorrow so he doesn’t have to dwell on his childhood and such, although around Christmastime he does find himself thinking about things that happened to him when he was younger, like the time he asked Santa for either his daddy or a jigsaw puzzle and the fictional old man provided neither. But overall Bill is just doing his coal merchant thing when he has a series of unsettling encounters at the big convent that sits perched over the town of New Ross, separated from the girls’ school his two oldest go to only by a suspiciously broken-glass-topped wall.
The unsettling encounters–one with a girl who asks him to let her out the back door so she can drown herself, the second with an unwed young mother who had been locked in the coal-shed overnight–put Bill into a bit of a moral crisis. Crossing any Church order was, practically speaking, deeply unwise, and he has a family to look after and a hard-won respectability in the community to maintain, especially in the economic slump that was going on in 1985. What will Bill do, and what will be the cost? Will the consequences of the public shame of crossing the Church on behalf of a girl of “low” character outweigh the private shame of looking away, doing nothing, and continuing to go to church like a big hypocrite?
Being a novella, this book doesn’t dig in real deep either to the specifics of what went on in the laundries (there are, you know, nonfiction books and government reports for that), nor to what happens to Bill after he makes a decision. Being a completist-minded sort I would definitely be down to find out what happens to Bill and Sarah and Eileen and the girls and the town of New Ross; I am used to a story structure where making a decision to take an action out in public is basically the inciting incident for a story, not the end of it. But as a psychological novella it works very well as a story about one man’s path toward making a decision.
One thing I liked about this book is that it’s very detailed, giving a very textured account of the material aspects of Bill’s life. I spent a good deal of the book Googling various brand-name products that were apparently common in lower-middle-class households in Ireland in the 1980s, many of which apparently still exist although they’re not exactly popular in the US or I wouldn’t have had to Google them. (I’m wondering if Pamplemousse carries Ribena now; they have a lot of British and Irish imports.) I also had to look up the word “stotious” (which means drunk) so I definitely feel like this book packed a lot of enlarging my understanding into a very small number of pages.
Another thing I liked about this book was the dialogue; as a hideous American millennial I found the speech patterns and word choices of these folks in the old country to be very charming and linguistically interesting, and I was trying to imagine the accents in my head except my mental geography of Irish accents is a bit weak. At any rate I will never not be a sucker for Hiberno-English even when people are using it to say small-minded things, which happens a lot in sad Irish literature.
I am excited to next read Foster, which is the book An Cailín Ciúin is based off of and which is apparently the specific favorite of recent Oscar winner and celebrated Corkman Cillian Murphy. I already know the storyline but also the storyline isn’t really the point, I think. It’ll be interesting to see how it works in writing and in English instead of on film and in Irish.
After watching An Cailín Ciúin I decided I should check out some Claire Keegan. She is apparently a favorite of recent Oscar winner and celebrated Corkman Cillian Murphy, who is also the star of an adaptation of her novella Small Things Like These, which premiered at Berlinale a few weeks ago and has not hit theatrical release yet. I am grumpy that I cannot watch this movie, but I can read the novella, so I did.
This story is about the Magdalene laundries and it starts off very pointedly with an excerpt from the Proclamation of 1916, specifically quoting the bit about guaranteeing religious and civil liberties and cherishing all the children of the nation equally. I knew going into it that this was a story about how monstrously Ireland failed at upholding that ideal in the first eight decades or so of its existence (or arguably, all of it up until 2018, depending on whether you want to mark the abortion referendum or the closing of the last Magdalene laundry as the date upon which it entered modern morality), and also I have this exact text hanging on my wall, but I still found it emotionally effective.
Small Things Like These is more or less of the non-genre genre people call “general fiction,” where it isn’t a mystery or a western or a romance or sci-fi or anything like that, just a story about more or less contemporary people doing basically believable things. This is, to be frank, not a type of book I read much of! You could maybe call this historical fiction a little if you want to count 1985 as historical, which I feel a bit weird about doing. But at any rate it is sort of a slice-of-life novella except life in 1980’s Ireland meant living right on top of some very nasty institutions that everybody pretended were basically fine and surely all the things you heard about them were just gossip.
Our protagonist here is a forty-year-old man named Bill Furlong, the illegitimate son of a single mother who had had the good fortune to be employed by an independently well-off (or at least self-sufficient) Protestant woman of kind character and less judgmental sexual morals than the prevailing Catholic ethos of the times. This meant that instead of being adopted out to Americans or Australians or somebody, Bill was allowed to be raised by his mother, who retained her live-in employment as a domestic at Mrs. Wilson’s. Thus, Bill had more or less three parental figures–his mother; the paternal farmhand, Ned; and the grandmotherly Mrs. Wilson, who encouraged him to read and study and look up words in the dictionary and generally be of quiet Protestant work ethic type habits, and who gave him some money to get started up with when he got married. As a result, Bill survived the taunts of his schoolmates about as unscathed as anybody in mid-century Ireland managed to be and worked his way up in a coalyard from wage laborer to coal merchant, securing a reasonably safe and modern lifestyle for himself, his wife Eileen, and eventually their five daughters.
Bill mostly keeps his head down and works and has only the occasional bouts of existential philosophizing and restlessness, usually thinking about what he has to do tomorrow so he doesn’t have to dwell on his childhood and such, although around Christmastime he does find himself thinking about things that happened to him when he was younger, like the time he asked Santa for either his daddy or a jigsaw puzzle and the fictional old man provided neither. But overall Bill is just doing his coal merchant thing when he has a series of unsettling encounters at the big convent that sits perched over the town of New Ross, separated from the girls’ school his two oldest go to only by a suspiciously broken-glass-topped wall.
The unsettling encounters–one with a girl who asks him to let her out the back door so she can drown herself, the second with an unwed young mother who had been locked in the coal-shed overnight–put Bill into a bit of a moral crisis. Crossing any Church order was, practically speaking, deeply unwise, and he has a family to look after and a hard-won respectability in the community to maintain, especially in the economic slump that was going on in 1985. What will Bill do, and what will be the cost? Will the consequences of the public shame of crossing the Church on behalf of a girl of “low” character outweigh the private shame of looking away, doing nothing, and continuing to go to church like a big hypocrite?
Being a novella, this book doesn’t dig in real deep either to the specifics of what went on in the laundries (there are, you know, nonfiction books and government reports for that), nor to what happens to Bill after he makes a decision. Being a completist-minded sort I would definitely be down to find out what happens to Bill and Sarah and Eileen and the girls and the town of New Ross; I am used to a story structure where making a decision to take an action out in public is basically the inciting incident for a story, not the end of it. But as a psychological novella it works very well as a story about one man’s path toward making a decision.
One thing I liked about this book is that it’s very detailed, giving a very textured account of the material aspects of Bill’s life. I spent a good deal of the book Googling various brand-name products that were apparently common in lower-middle-class households in Ireland in the 1980s, many of which apparently still exist although they’re not exactly popular in the US or I wouldn’t have had to Google them. (I’m wondering if Pamplemousse carries Ribena now; they have a lot of British and Irish imports.) I also had to look up the word “stotious” (which means drunk) so I definitely feel like this book packed a lot of enlarging my understanding into a very small number of pages.
Another thing I liked about this book was the dialogue; as a hideous American millennial I found the speech patterns and word choices of these folks in the old country to be very charming and linguistically interesting, and I was trying to imagine the accents in my head except my mental geography of Irish accents is a bit weak. At any rate I will never not be a sucker for Hiberno-English even when people are using it to say small-minded things, which happens a lot in sad Irish literature.
I am excited to next read Foster, which is the book An Cailín Ciúin is based off of and which is apparently the specific favorite of recent Oscar winner and celebrated Corkman Cillian Murphy. I already know the storyline but also the storyline isn’t really the point, I think. It’ll be interesting to see how it works in writing and in English instead of on film and in Irish.