The story is set in an Irish town, during the Christmas season of the year 1985. The small community is dominated by the church. There are schools run by the church, along with a convent whose building sits on the outskirts. Besides the nuns in the convent are girls who have been abandoned, have borne children out of marriage, or are considered of easy virtue. They are kept under the supervision of these nuns.

The main protagonist of the story is a coal and timber merchant named Bill Furlong, who also delivers coal and timber to the convent. With a responsible spouse and five sensible daughters, Furlong works hard and takes good care of his family and those who work for him in the business.

Furlong struggles to keep his focus on the present and not dwell on his distressed past — glimpses of which appear and reappear in his mind from time to time. Born out of wedlock, he also lost his mother when young. A kind lady, who had employed Furlong’s mother as a housemaid, took it upon herself to raise him. He also remains troubled by the desire to search for his unknown father.

But the real story is about Furlong mustering courage from his innate humanity to rescue one miserable girl from the clutches of those who run a Magdalene laundry in the convent. He draws his strength from his Christian faith to challenge the oppressive clergy.

Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These is truly an outstanding work of historical fiction. First published in November 2020 by Grove Press, and then soon after in 2021 by Faber and Faber, the book has received rave reviews, many prestigious awards and has drawn praise from leading writers such as Colm Toibin, who called it the best novel he read in 2021.

Merely 114 pages in a good-sized font, Small Things Like These is more like a novella. Keegan’s economy of words, conciseness and precision make it absorbing. A reader will find it hard to put it down before finishing it. Keegan has opened a wide window into Irish social history with great facility. She has also explained the emotional dynamics of how a regular Irish family and the community function in a small town — or, perhaps, how they functioned until some years ago.

We distort our history to glorify our past. Consequently, we are unable to learn anything from what went wrong.

The emotional tensions we see in Furlong’s heart are palpable. With Keegan’s absolute command over language and idiom, there is neither a clever sentence nor an irreverent expression in the whole narrative. The author has woven a heart-touching story of compassion and hope like few have in contemporary literature. The novel also reminded me of the fiction by German author and playwright Bertolt Brecht, although Keegan’s style comes across as more tender and less rhetorical.

Magdalene laundries, also termed as Magdalene asylums, were run by the Roman Catholic Church in concert with the Irish state across the country since the 18th century. The last such institution was closed down as recently as 1996. Here, supposedly ‘fallen women’ were incarcerated and subjected to forced labour.

The apparent function of these places was to launder clothes for the communities on an industrial scale. The living and working conditions were hideous — some description of that can be found in the novel as well. Thousands of girls and women, including infants, lost their lives because they were kept hidden within the four walls of these institutions. There was also a lucrative child adoption business that ran on the side, with young mothers forced to leave their children for adoption by well-to-do families.

In her brief note at the end of the book, Keegan writes: “It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that 9,000 infants died in just 18 of the institutions investigated.”

In 2013, the Irish prime minister apologised on behalf of the state for its role in the Magdalene laundries in the past and set up a compensation scheme for the survivors. But there remain thousands and thousands of women and children over centuries who will remain unknown and unacknowledged.

Many countries and societies in the world are coming to terms with their past. This includes accepting their wrongdoings as governments or nations and recognising crimes committed by them against humanity. Recognition of the Jewish Holocaust or the slave trade are a couple of such examples.

Although similar recognition of colonial violence and extortion in Asia and Africa is also needed by European nations and by Israel for what it has persistently done to the Palestinians, overall it is a welcome development that historic records are being set straight by some. We also see the church reconciling with the crimes and excesses committed in its name, seeking apology on many occasions and setting new standards for itself. This is another welcome development.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case in Pakistan. We even distort our history to glorify everything that has happened in our past. Consequently, we are unable to learn anything from what went wrong, take responsibility for decisions that made our people suffer, and then correct the course accordingly. It is about time that we rise up to the challenge of reconciling with all aspects of our past, including our mistakes.

For instance, no closure has been brought to the mass killings in the plains of Punjab in 1947 and there has been no honest conversation on the tragedy of East Pakistan in 1971. There is no soul-searching either among the ruling elites or society at large on what wrongs we have committed in the recent past.

In order to evolve and grow, it is our right as a society to be informed of our history which offers us both pride and repentance.

The columnist is a poet and essayist. He has recently edited Pakistan Here and Now: Insights into Society, Culture, Identity and Diaspora. His latest collection of verse is Hairaan Sar-i-Bazaar

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 11th, 2022