With December about to end, so many of the lists of ‘best books of the year’ have already been revealed by the booktubers, newspapers, authors, and publishers. Amidst these lists, there are certain books that get repeated several times, which although deserving, creates an overbearing hype around them. But every so often, there appears a new name, which throughout the year has been muted, that brings a new-found joy.
Keegan’s novella was one of those unheard books that got its recommendations in these year-end lists. Championed by many authors, this novella stood out as ‘the book’ to read amongst the others suggestions. With such vital recommendations and facilitating tech (a tablet with internet connection) that could fulfill on them, such ubiquitous reading is all a reader could ask for.
Taking place in a town of Ireland in 1985, this novella tells the life of Bill Furlong, a father of five girls who works as a delivery man at the coal mines. Furlong’s father died before he was born and his single mother was taken in by Mrs. Wilson, herself a single woman living in a big house. It was there that Furlong was born, and although his mother died soon after, Mrs. Wilson took Furlong as one of her own. Married with Eileen now and their five daughters, life still is just as harsh on the Irelanders, but thankfully the Furlong family is giddying along just fine. Except that they have five daughters, and Furlong worries what would happen to them when they’d grow up. As early on one Sunday, December’s first, with Christmas fast approaching, Furlong while taking the deliveries, finds a girl in the coal-house of Church, who says that her child has been taken away from her, and herself locked therein.
This book is set against the true historical events of Ireland’s ‘Magdalen laundries’ case, where around thirty-thousand women were concealed and forced to labor, while their babies either died or were adopted out from their mothers. These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church.
While this horrific and saddening event itself makes this novella worth-reading and exploring about, Keegan’s beautifully told fictional story of Furlong whose mother was luckily rescued, otherwise she might’ve been one of those thirty-thousand concealed women, and who himself is now father of five daughters, as he comes upon one of the incarcerated girls, makes for a much more moving and ‘real’ experience. Numbers presented so coldly in forms of stats or facts might never come to mean anything real, unless the buried stories behind those cold facts come out to speak their magnifying truth.
Much like Adania Shibli’s novella ‘Minor Detail’ which satirically magnified the story of a Palestinian girl gang-raped by Israeli military men in 1950s, Keegan’s story also magnifies the ‘small things’ that Mrs. Wilson did for Furlong’s mother, small lessons that Furlong learned in his childhood, small deeds that he now does out of his good character, and so on – and shows how in these small things lie the biggest pleasures and differences of life. Keegan’s novella not only successfully reiterates a horrible historical event, but does so with a story that is gentle, softening, reassuring, and beautifully told.
I loved how this story of a closely-bonded, small family, in a small Irish town, in the season of wintery Christmas, regifted me the serene and uplifting joys of reading. Tendering!
Ratings: 5/5 ***** December 22, 2021_