Small Things Like These is a diminutive book, written by Claire Keegan, who, the back cover of the book tells me, won many prizes, such as the Rooney Prize for Irish literature - awarded for the book Antarctica, while another of her books - Walk the Blue Fields won a prize called the Edge Hill prize, a prize given out for collections of short stories, but her awards don't end there - she also won one of the "richest" literary prizes in the world, and I think she did it for writing very long sentences, just like this one I have manufactured - which is now over one hundred words long.
That is how sentences feel in Small Things Like These, the tale of a man named Bill working around Christmas day to get coal delivered. No, it isn't a bad-boy santa-claus fan-fction full of heinously naughty boys and girls, but it is a story about the tension and control of the Church in the Northern parts of the UK and beyond.
We spend a lot of time in BIll's head while he does his work day. While the book is set in 1985, a time when life was not really all that much different in terms of a day to day struggle as what it is today, there is struggle painted on everybody in the town the book is set. Industrial facilities are closing, people are getting ill, some are dying, and life goes on through new generations of births.
Bill works to give his girls the best chance in life, by sending them to a posh school. He runs around interacting with a great deal of the town, and in a way, his is their source of warmth and food. In this place, without the coal and firewood he delivers, there's no warmth or cooking. It is a tapestry of a town, and we see the whole lot.
Mostly, in the short bit of prose, we see a brief snapshot that does not begin to encompass the mistreatment of young women by various churches in facilities and conditions designed to exploit their labour for profit.
We see this reflected in a single young lady who shares her desire to fling herself into a river, from a point up on high, and women revitalising the floor of a church building using technology certainly not befitting the period of the setting.
All along the way, long sentences and awkward turns of phrase tumble from the pages, as they fly away shortly. This is the sort of book that can be read in a single sitting, but at the same time - a great deal of nothing really happens along the way.
There's some character development that occurs with Bill - and there's some rescuing of women, and a good bit of the snapshot of the era, but it is a book that didn't really surprise me or teach me anything new.
This is a departure from my usual genre of reading, and was a recommendation from a friend. I do not begrudge them for it, but I have learned that, as another friend told me, that Irish literature may not be my cup of tea. Still, there's an interesting story here, but based on the writing - I do not see how it is a literary marvel.
There must be an awful number of terrible books coming out of Irish literary circles for this one to be considered one of the very best. Does an author ever get to a point where it is just momentum from the last award carrying them forward? Or am I entirely and totally missing the cultural context and the literary genius behind Keegan's run on sentences?
I don't know, but this book was certainly not one for me. The book was also turned into a movie. I won't be watching it.
