JH – Comments & score 8
A short spare novel in which each word seems to count – beautifully written, succinct, concise and powerful. Much to digest and wanting to be reread to capture the detail and nuances.
It is the story of Bill Furlong and his family living in the Irish town of New Ross. It starts in late autumn when it is cold and damp - “people unhappily endured the weather”. It was mid-1980s – a time of economic pressures with many “badly off” – such as Mick Sinnott “on the road again foraging for sticks” – who was “stotious at the phone box”. The story takes us up to Christmas and the challenge of whether Bill should help a young girl, Sarah, locked in the coal house of a convent and who just wants to drown herself. There is a sub-plot around his search for his father which comes to a head when he realises, he may well have been hiding in plain sight: Ned the farmhand, now ill in hospital.
Bill Furlong is a coal & timber merchant who has a head for business, “was known for getting along” – he had “developed good protestant habits”. He is married to Eileen with five daughters. Though Bill is successful, he doesn’t “feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway”. He delivers coal to the local convent, which he sees as “a powerful looking place”, which among other things runs a laundry and a training school for girls “of low character” – a place about which people said lots of thing a good half of which could not be believed”.
Many convents across Ireland ran such Magdalene laundries, and their infamous reputation and the role of nuns who ran them is seared into the Irish psyche. Why did such women cause so much suffering to other women in the name of charity is unfathomable. Though it is worth remembering that these Magdalene houses were not just an Irish issue. Originally a mediaeval creation Magdalene Asylums were houses of refuge or reformatories for ‘fallen women’. They had existed for centuries as refuges for women but in mid-eighteenth century the British Isles witnessed a new wave of them. The first one opened in London in 1758 as the London Magdalene Hospital. One was established in Bath in 1805 which could house nearly 80 women. Historians estimate that by the late 1800s there were more than 300 Magdalen Institutions in England alone. They were also established across the US, Canada, Sweden and Australia.
Bill is delivering coal to the convent a few days before Christmas when he finds a girl, Sarah, locked in the coal shed who pleads with him to take him to the river so she could drown herself. He could/should have ignored her “the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get home”, but he took her to the front door of convent and had to deal with the Mother Superior “you’ll come in – I’ll not hear it otherwise”. When he returns home that evening his wife, who is tough and realistic, tells him it was “nothing to do with them”. She tells him not to alienate the nuns when they always paid what was owing – “if you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore so you can keep on”. New Ross is a small town and news travels fast. Mrs Kehoe, who runs the café where Bill and his workers have lunch, warns him to watch what he says about the nuns as best to “keep the enemy close, the bad dog with you and the good dog will not bite”.
Despite all this on Christmas Eve Bill goes back to the Convent and finds Sarah locked again in the coal shed. She walks home with Sarah back across town. Bill knows he will face much hassle and criticism, but he keeps walking on. The book concludes with an incredibly evocative commentary on Bill and his own emotions. He understands the enormity of what he was doing but asks himself “was there any point in being alive without helping one another”, and how he needs to be “brave enough to go against what was there”. He believes he is doing the right thing but also understands that there will be hell to pay for this small act of kindness, and that “the worst was yet to come… he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also behind him: the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured”….. “his fear outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he hoped and believed that they would manage”.
WM – Comments & score 10
This deserves to be in the category of ‘a great book’. It fulfils the criteria of being beautifully descriptive of both the physical setting and social milieu, in as few words as necessary. The author has created a great sense of place, and well describes Bill’s dilemmas, uncertainties and fantasies. WM saw this as a brave book; it raises large issues of morality and humanity. It also challenges the reader with questions as to what would be their own behaviour in such circumstances. He couldn’t fault it and so on reflection upped his score to a well-deserved 10.
MT – Comments & score 7.8
I really liked this short book. He found it easy to read, well written, and in fact I read it twice. The second time around and picked up many things I had missed, and very much looking at the Ned connection, now knew he was the possible father.
I really liked Bill, and his longing to find his father, and his desire to give something back because of his mother’s good fortune with the Wilsons. His good thoughts and deeds contrast very well with the awfulness of the corruption and hypocritical nature of the church. The poverty and cruelty of the time and church was so well set out, as was the plight and place of women in their society. It was awful that they were totally to blame for pregnancy, never the men.
Bill’s family life and his daughters was well portrayed, as was the totally different outlook of Bill from his wife Eileen and maybe falling apart of his marriage. She was quite nasty in the end, and her using his mother’s hardside as a stone was hard and well described, as were her nasty racist comments and Bill’s involvement with the docks and foreigners.
The book is very reflective of the church and Bill’s Christian status, particularly the bit about the sermon on the stations of the cross, and him seeing all the awful things at the convent. Bill sees his Christian faith as in a mirror and how he must help the stray girls, Sarah in particular. The book ends of course with him taking the girl home, and what may happen. But he is hopeful - aware of Eileen’s comments about possibly inviting a boy for Christmas lunch, and she said, no problem it will just be another body on the table.
The author well captures Bill’s reflections about the drudgery of work and life. It made it sound so awful, work in the dark, back in the dark, quick supper, bed and repeat. I was grateful that my work was not like that, even when at times it felt to be on repeat all the time. I was very struck about the bit about sliding doors and how Bill could have another life, for example, when he meets the beautiful long haired woman one morning. What might have been… we all have been there.
AA - Comments & score 8.5
This is a novella – it is only the author’s fourth book in twenty years. I felt it had a terrific start – the setting of the place and its people in the opening paragraph. The writes with lyrical evocative prose. Story moves along seamlessly, beautifully crafted “he let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding”.
I liked the trees, the river, the crows and the doorways that Furlong was always passing through “Furlong stepped back – as though the step could take him back into the time before this”. He also liked the choice of Furlong, as the main protagonist – a man, a father of daughters, whose own mother had been spared the laundry by Mrs Wilson, but who had died young apparently after a fall in the yard, and who had fallen pregnant apparently to Ned, the farmhand of the woman who took in her and her baby – Bill Furlong.
The story is set against a backdrop of poverty and unemployment in 1985: “early one morning, Furlong had seen a young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat’s bowl behind the priest’s house”. It highlights the role of the Magdalen laundries were a crime against women who were already victims – of the system, of the Church, of men, of other women, and directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children. Tens of thousands of women and girls were incarcerated - until 1996. How the systems of power and organisation are accepted and taken for granted such as the Church, and not questioned. How people’s lives were easier if they just kept their heads down and got on quietly – as in most societies, oppressive or not: For example even Eileen, Furlong’s wife was loath to let her sympathies lie with the girls who got pregnant.
But perhaps it’s mostly the story of Furlong and his quest to show to someone the kindness Mrs Wilson had shown to him – which led him to realise that he mattered as much as any other child. Keegan goes further stating in a later interview that Bill may be having a mid-life crisis and having been loved in his youth wants to offer the same type of love to someone else. She has also said that Furlong is ‘a Christian who cannot practise his Christianity in Ireland’ – “He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life”.
This is a powerful short, but not small, book about power and institutions, kindness and courage, complicity and silence.
CW – Comments & score 8.75
I really enjoyed this book so much so that I finished it in one sitting. I loved the prose and easy style of the narration. Everything was very simply described and yet I felt completely absorbed by the atmosphere of this sleepy town just before Christmas and the day-to-day life of the local coal merchant and his family who are managing to prosper when others in the town are feeling the pinch.
Although the storyline about unwed pregnant mothers and their treatment in Irish convents is one which is well known about the fact that this was still going on in 1985 is all the more shocking. I liked the simplicity of the book and the main character who is presented with a decision which many others in his town have decided to turn a blind eye to. One wonders why it took so long for this abuse to be fully exposed and how much is still going on in one form or other not only in the Catholic Church but every other religious setting.
The book carried a simple message about whether one can go through life doing that which one considers is right and helping others generally or whether there is that extra commitment that one can make which will take you outside your comfort zone and potentially put you at risk. As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, for decades, through an entire life without once been brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
A really good book
MW – Comments & score 8.00
A short but quite brilliant little story with a devastating subject matter that Ireland would prefer to look away from. It is easy for us in Great Britain to show wide eyed astonishment and disapproval of the Magdalen laundries and the Mother and Baby homes which seem like something out of the Middle Ages, but, incredibly, existed into the 1990s. However we all have our own skeletons in the closet and I am not sure that we can afford to be too complacent. He who casts the first stone…
For me, the complicity of both church and state is the most damming thing, and the way in which the power wielded by these two institutions was enough to make people look the other way. The fictional Christmas story that the author weaves around one such institution is written with such understated skill and subtlety, leaving much to the imagination and is all the more powerful for this. The ‘advice’ given to Bill to not rock the boat, and the general community peer pressure rings horribly true. Hard to see Bill’s life being particularly easy after freeing Sarah. Part 2 of the story would be very interesting indeed! In the end, it’s more of a symbolic gesture, the reality is more disconcerting but don’t get me started on that one.
RV – Comments & score 8.75
There was a lot to like: I very much liked the main character, Furlong; and the lovely, light but lyrical prose: “It was a December of crows. People had never seen the likes of them, gathering in black batches on the outskirts of town then coming in, walking the streets, cocking their heads and perching, impudently, on whatever lookout post that took their fancy, scavenging for what was dead, or diving in mischief for anything that looked edible along the roads before roosting at night in the huge old trees around the convent.”
I had a sense of foreboding throughout a lot of the book, in part because so much in the book and the characters was so lovely: I started to become quite tense, hoping that it all would continue, but tense, waiting for some disaster to befall them. Most books don’t simply tell you about real families, going about their daily lives, relating to each other – they set that up so that a disaster can occur! So I was half expecting one of the children to have a terrible accident – some external event that would de-rail their lives. I did not actually expect that the event would be something that HE did.
I felt that there were a number of important themes. One was people’s need to know where they came from – something most of us don’t feel very strongly because we KNOW the answer and hence take that for granted. But many people, either adopted or with no knowledge about one of their parents, have this keen desire, almost need, to know their roots, where they came from:
“Before going back into the house, he’d washed his face at the horse-trough, breaking the ice on the surface, pushing his hands down deep in the cold and keeping them there, to divert his pain, until he could no longer feel it. Where was his father now? Sometimes, he caught himself looking at older men, trying to find a physical resemblance, or listening out for some clue in the things people said.”
In my work as an expert witness for the family courts, I was often in the position of discussing adoption for children whose parents’ problems were such that it was not in the children’s best interests to live with those parents. But I was also keenly aware of this ‘need to know‘ about one’s roots, so I usually fought for an ‘open adoption’ where there would still be contact with these kids families; and usually the courts and the social services did not understand this, and they fought for closed adoptions, fearing it would cause more conflict and confusion for the children.
Another and certainly one of the most important themes was “What was it all for”? The fundamental question of life, I suppose, and one that is of central importance for Furlong, our protagonist. Related to that is the question that (I am sure) many of us have reflected on – what would we do in such difficult circumstance. We know that it is right to speak out; but what if the consequences of that are ruinous in some way.
Do you intervene in the attack that is happening before your eyes in the street, and risk being killed or at least badly hurt? Or do you stand back and let someone else be killed or maimed?
Do you intervene with these so-called nuns, and risk you own family and your entire livelihood, or not?
As he says: “He stood back then and faced her. ‘Surely they’ve only as much power as we give them, Mrs Kehoe?’ ‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’ She paused then and looked at him the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys. More than once, maybe more than several times, Eileen had done the same. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, ‘but you’ve worked hard, the same as myself, to get to where you are now. You’ve reared a fine family of girls – and you know there’s nothing only a wall separating that place from St Margaret’s.’ Furlong took no offence, softened. ‘I do know, Mrs Kehoe.’ ‘Can’t I count on one hand the number of girls from around here that ever got on well who didn’t walk those halls,’ she said, splaying her palm. ‘I’m sure that’s fact.’ ‘They belong to different orders,’ she went on, ‘but believe you me, they’re all the one . You can’t side against one without damaging your chances with the other.’”
This is the key moral point in the book, and is reflected in so many of the decisions we take, even in our protected society – it was a key issue in WW2 across Europe – stand up and be killed, or acquiesce, and let evil happen. The well-known adage: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” or, as John Stuart Mill stated in 1867, “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
The ending (and THAT it ended so quickly) was surprising (the book could have gone on for a lot longer, and she could have written much more about the consequences of his decisions) but it was also a great way to finish – he knew that his decisions would have as yet unforeseen but certainly very bad consequences, but as he says “the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life”.
SC – Comments & score 9.5
A short yet very powerful book. to begin with, deceptively inconsequential - the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove. For several reasons this resonated strongly with me. But first, I loved the stripped-down elegance of the prose - what an opening paragraph! ‘In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.’
About 45 years ago (maybe a few years before the events of the book), I was hitch hiking back from the west coast of Ireland with a girlfriend, heading for Rosslare and the ferry home. Unlike me, my girlfriend was a seasoned hitcher, but, as she frequently reminded me, it’s much harder with two and what I should really be doing is hiding behind a tree while she batted her eyelids at the passing traffic. For whatever reason, it was taking us days to get along the south coast and on night two we ended up camping in a sloping field just outside New Ross. As dusk fell we walked into the town in search of food and a couple of pints. The early September evening had an autumnal chill. Peat smoke drifted across the hazy streets exactly like Keegan’s ‘hairy drawn-out strings’ and the street lighting was dim and sporadic. Cutting back from the main street at the quayside, I was startled to find that not only did the street lighting give out almost as soon as you left the main drag, but the side roads weren’t surfaced. Just gravel, rutted and puddled. Visiting Ireland in those days often carried a sense of travelling back maybe thirty or forty years, but this was like stepping back a century.
So it felt particularly appropriate to me that this story covering a small but hugely significant stage in Ireland’s journey to greater self-awareness should be set here. New Ross always felt like a place out of time. I didn’t know anything about the convent, although it was certainly there. The Albatros fertiliser factory mentioned in the book was a huge and slightly scary presence for decades after it closed: demolition was problematic because of the extensive asbestos sheet cladding.
I think Keegan set the book up very skilfully. Furlong is a likeable, hard-working man with some intelligence but little self-confidence, despite running a moderately successful small business. A coal-merchant probably wouldn’t be the first candidate for expressing self-doubt and questioning what he sees around him - so Keegan makes him an orphan, with a background that only becomes clearer as we go through the book.
So many little touches that resonate: ‘The chipper’ - the chip shop, ubiquitous terminology throughout Ireland. ‘Joan, who had gone on ahead, was handing out carol sheets with other members of the choir, while the nuns walked around, supervising and talking to some of the more well-off parents.’ - Nuns directing their efforts where it was least needed but counted most to them.
Furlong’s self-doubt was thoroughly believable (despite reminding me rather distractingly of Raymond Briggs’ ‘Fungus the Bogeyman’, who had a similarly tedious, dirty job that he hated and constantly questioned his motives): ‘I’m not sure what I mean, Eileen.’ Furlong sighed. ‘I’m just a bit weary tonight, is all. Pay no heed.’ What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?’
And then the story develops around the children kept by the nuns - the kids’ people never see, who don’t get to come to the carol service and who it turns out don’t even have shoes on their feet. But despite his shock and sense of wrong, he finds himself playing the nuns’ game, falling into the accepted social patterns of the community and of the times, stopping for his breakfast, allowing himself to be pandered to as the nuns realise he has perhaps seen too much - and he was angry with himself that he did nothing about it at the time: ‘What most tormented him was not so much how she’d been left in the coal shed or the stance of the Mother Superior; the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he’d allowed that and had not asked about her baby – the one thing she had asked him to do – and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he’d gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass.’
Furlong achieves a kind of rebirth - perhaps indeed a mid-life crisis -,when he walks home with Sarah, and as he goes he knows he’ll get all the flak he’d expect from Eileen: ‘The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.’
While in 2023 the RC church still dominates much of rural Ireland, among the younger generations at least there is far less blind faith. And to be fair, for many souls they still play a very important part in country life. Without the church, there would be a lot of lonely people. But the way individuals (mostly nuns) are still fighting the nuns’ corner, arguing ‘what else were they supposed to do’ shows how far they still have to go. Passing New Ross as I do several times a year, I still recall my hitchhiking stopover - a small town of dark and smoky back streets and muddy roadways. It seems entirely fitting to learn, even belatedly, that it concealed more sinister stories and one wonders how many other of the huge seminary buildings that one passes as you drive through Ireland had equally appalling histories. The last 'Magdalen Laundry' closed in 1996.
For me, a quite brilliant short book.
CB – Comments & score 8.00
This is a charming novella, despite its dark story line. It is winter in the 1985, when “the people, for the most part, unhappily endured the weather”. Bill Furlong is doing a roaring trade in coal and timber, the coal imported by the Polish and Russian boatmen, “a novelty going about town in their fur caps and long, buttoned coats, with hardly a word of English.”
He is the lucky one as his mother, falling pregnant is looked after by her protestant employer who also takes the young Furlong under her wing. Unlike, the girls, separated from their babies and made to work in the convent laundry up the hill. “Now, [an orphan since 12] he lived in the town with his wife, Eileen, and their five daughters. He’d met Eileen while she was working in the office of Graves & Co. and had courted her in the usual ways, taking her to the cinema and for long walks along the towpath in the evenings. He was attracted to her shiny black hair and slate eyes, her practical, agile mind.”
Writing: This is a delight to read as it flows so easily with its descriptions of the town, the weather, the people, the leading characters and Bill’s thoughts. Always satisfying when ordinary lives are described so (apparently) effortlessly to be interesting “..chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain”.
Characters: Like Eileen, Bill too has an agile mind which makes him a thinker and questioner as well as a doer. And he is a sensitive soul: “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.” And this all led to some tensions: “But some part of his mind was often tense; he could not say why.” But he keeps on keeping on: “The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls”
And concludes that living in the now with occasional poignant memories is better than worrying too much about the future: “Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.” Yet he comes back to reflection: “Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”
The other characters, Eileen, his daughters, his mother, Mrs Wilson, Ned are rather lightly drawn. The book is definitely about Bill and his response to the world around him and the plight of the girls at the convent.
Social setting: The setting of a struggling economy is well drawn (e.g. the boy drinking the cat’s milk behind the convent), albeit without comment except to keep on going. Eileen also expresses the view of many about how to respond to the goings on at the convent: “‘Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.’ She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. ‘If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.’” It is Bill’s conscience rather than a political awareness that drives him to act: “As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
Not sure why Keegan chose a man as the leading character in a novel about women’s suffering? Will his “small thing” be the thing that opens up the cruel treatment and murder of women and babies by the church?
Lovely conclusion to the novel which sums up the message and meaning of the novel: “The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured and might yet surpass. Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.”
