One of the key reasons authoritarians can get away with horrific acts and even murder is because of the complicit silence of “good people” in the community. None is more damning than the silence of the church. In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote of his surprise that the white churches did not support the famous bus boycott against racial segregation on public transit. Some showed outright hostility, he wrote, but “all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”

Of course, sometime the church is itself the authoritarian power. Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries certainly existed — and even thrived — because of complicit silence both inside and outside the church. *

Thankfully, confrontations against complicit silence come in all sizes. And even the small challenges can have tremendous impact.

Small Things Like These (2021) by Claire Keegan is a short yet deeply moving novel set in small-town Ireland during the Christmas season of 1985. Bill Furlong is a coal and timber merchant who works hard supporting his family while running a small business that employs several other men in the community. Well-liked and well respected, Furlong “had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say.”

His mother became pregnant at the age of sixteen while working as a domestic for Mrs. Wilson, a Protestant widow who lived “in the big house a few miles outside of town.” With no father in sight, Furlong’s mother is disowned by her family; yet her employer takes her in and helps raise young Bill. He goes to school and eventually becomes a local merchant, meets his wife Eileen, and they have four girls who, when we meet them, are doing well at the local Catholic school for young women.

As Christmas approaches, Furlong takes a load of coal to the local convent and makes a discovery that forces him to consider his past and the choices he must make in the face of complicit silence.

The silence hits very close to home when Eileen reminds him that the discovery “Tis not one of ours.” He responds, “Isn’t it a good job Mrs. Wilson didn’t share your ideas?” When he takes his yardmen to the local pub for a Christmas dinner, the owner, Mrs. Kehoe, lets him know that she had heard that Bill “had a run-in with herself above at the convent.”

Her advice? “You want to watch over what you’d say about what’s there. Keep the enemy close, the bad dog with you and the good dog will not bite.” Surely you must know, she adds, “these nuns have a finger in every pie.”

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and winner of the Orwell Prize, Small Things Like These brings us face-to-face, in a simple yet memorable story, with how we confront our past and with the evils of a community’s complicit, self-interested silence. It is also a deeply moving story of “hope, quiet heroism, and empathy.”

Small Things Like These is a little gem of a novel.

More to come . . .

DJB

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*What were the Magdalene laundries?

From the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 until 1996, at least 10,000 girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions. These were carceral, punitive institutions that ran, commercial and for-profit businesses primarily laundries and needlework. After 1922, the Magdalene Laundries were operated by four religious orders (The Sisters of Mercy, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, and the Good Shepherd Sisters) in ten different locations around Ireland (click here for a map). The last Magdalene Laundry ceased operating on 25^th October, 1996. The women and girls who suffered in the Magdalene Laundries included those who were perceived to be ‘promiscuous’, unmarried mothers, the daughters of unmarried mothers, those who were considered a burden on their families or the State, those who had been sexually abused, or had grown up in the care of the Church and State. Confined for decades on end — and isolated from their families and society at large — many of these women became institutionalised over time and therefore became utterly dependent on the relevant convents and unfit to re-enter society unaided.

Justice for Magdalenes Research

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The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.