'Small Things Like These': teaching notes 4

Fourth tranche of teaching notes on Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These in the light of the Comparative section of the Leaving Certificate, covering Section 6, from page 73 to page 87 (pagination Faber UK paperback edition).

I will be giving a free webinar on the book for English teachers on the evening of Tuesday 10th September 2024: register.

Also in this series:

• All notes together, downloadable.

• Resources and links.

• Sections 1 and 2.

• Section 3.

• Sections 4 and 5.

• Section 7.

• Using a George Saunders lens.

• The comparative modes.

SECTION 6: page 73 to 87

• 74: ironically, the card accompanying the £50 note shows the Virgin and child being led by Joseph on ‘The Flight into Egypt’, escaping from Herod. This book will end with another adult leading a child to safety, an escape. A tell-tale sign is that the inscription is in a ‘hurried-looking hand’, suggesting the Mother Superior has scribbled it in a rush at the last minute to accompany the money, a bribe to silence Furlong.

• 74: As Furlong gets ready for second Mass, he cleans his hands slowly, and scrubs his nails: his need to cleanse himself after the convent visit. Will he be a Pontius Pilate who washes his hands of this problem? He looks in the mirror (yet another reflection), examining himself.

• 75: then ‘with a fresh type of reluctance’ Furlong gets into his Sunday clothes. He was also ‘reluctant’ to take the £50 four pages earlier, and these tensions are swirling around inside him, so that Eileen is astonished by his untypically sharp reply about the collection: his displaced anger.

• 76+: the service, a whole community meeting. All the genuflection, a visible sign of the obeisance to the Church. Furlong ‘didn’t join in so much as listen, distractedly’ 77. And when the Communion starts, Furlong ‘stayed contrarily’ (see versions of this word on 69 and 71).

• 78: what should be a cosy Christmas family scene - but Furlong is restless, and has to be upbraided by Eileen for brushing the floor (another nervous cleaning gesture) while they are icing the cake. For Furlong ‘it felt as though the room was closing in’ and ‘A longing to get away came over him’. 80. He decides to visit Ned. Eileen can see that something is ‘ailing’ him, but soon he will understand that he has not seen the biggest truth about himself.

• 81: Furlong is relieved to be out; it was ‘sweet’. Yet again ‘a part of him’ wishes it were Monday and he could ‘lose himself’ in work. ‘Why could he not relax and enjoy [Sundays] like other men who took a pint or two after Mass before falling asleep at the fire with the newspaper, having eaten a plate of dinner?’ [What if anything do we expect he will do about the girl?]. The images of the bleak quay at the closed-down shipyard, where the huge gulls ‘forage, futilely’, like the boy foraging for sticks on 10 and the stray dogs on 12 ‘foraging for scraps in the bins’.

• 82-3. Ned’s story about stealing from Mrs Wilson. Later, think back: why does Ned talk so much at this point, referring to i) his contentment with living in a small room at Mrs Wilson’s (thus being with his son as he grew up in childhood) and ii) the anecdote about the hay, which he should not feel guilty for (it was an act of kindness), but does: that anecdote is about guilt, shame, regret. Then Furlong asks him if he knows who his father was?

• 84. ‘A part of him felt disinclined to go near the house’, and then he finds out that Ned is in a home convalescing from pneumonia and the woman at the door sees the likeness to Ned, and that they are related. The poignancy of Ned’s silence over almost 40 years: observing his son growing up, yet not feeling he can say anything.

• 86: outside in the lorry ‘a type of emptiness comes over him’ and he thinks about what the woman said about the likeness to Ned. He thinks about Sarah at the convent, and is ‘tormented’ by his failure to say or do anything, that he had not asked about the baby, his taking the money, his going to Mass ‘like a hypocrite’. He lets the thought ‘stoke his mind’

• 87. At the same time he is discovering his own father, he failed as a father-figure to an abandoned girl, and is ‘tormented’. The energy of this torment will transfer into the final section: it needs to go somewhere in the narrative.