Menace Without Violence: A Writing Lesson from Claire Keegan

In preparation for the upcoming film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson, I finally picked up the novel and read it to get ahead of the cinematic curve, as it were.

It didn’t take long to finish—in some ways the novel is an expanded short story—but the impact was profound.

In particular, Keegan’s ability to create menace without violence—or, I should say, overt violence—reminded me that some of the greatest threats we face are not physical so much as social, psychological, emotional, and moral.

By implication, they also provide some of the most dramatic forms of personal danger we can portray in our writing.

Here’s my seat-of-the-pants analysis of how Keegan gets this done.

The Setup: Character

We experience the events of the novel, which take place in late 1985, through the eyes of its protagonist, Bill Furlong, who is married with five daughters. He’s a fuel merchant:

Furlong sold coal, turf, anthracite, slack and logs. These were ordered by the hundredweight, the half hundredweight or the full tonne or lorry load. He also sold bales of briquettes, kindling and bottled gas. The coal was the dirtiest work and had, in winter, to be collected monthly, off the quays. Two full days it took for the men to collect, carry, sort and weigh it all out, back at the yard.

He is also something of a self-made man, which reveals two of his chief vulnerabilities: the risk of financial failure and the stain of his birth:

Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing. His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs. Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside town. When his mother’s trouble became known, and her people made it clear they’d have no more to do with her, Mrs. Wilson, instead of giving his mother her walking papers, told her she could stay on, and keep her work. On the morning Furlong was born, it was Mrs. Wilson who had his mother taken to the hospital, and had them brought home. It was the first of April, 1946, and some said the boy would turn out to be a fool.

As a school boy, Furlong had been jeered and called some ugly names; once, he’d come home with the back of his coat covered in spit, but his connection to the big house had given him some leeway, and protection.

After his mother dies suddenly when he’s 12 years old, Furlong seeks out his birth certificate and discovers it lists his father as “Unknown.”

After attending technical school, he winds up at a coal yard and works his way up.

He’d a head for business, was known for getting along, and could be relied upon, as he had developed good, Protestant habits; was given to rising early and had no taste for drink.

But the wolf never seems terribly far from the door:

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 see them getting on and completing their education at St Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in the town … It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew… The dole queues were getting longer … And farther out the country, he’d known cows to be left bawling to be milked because the man who had their care had upped, suddenly, and taken the boat to England … And early one morning, Furlong had seen a young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat’s bowl behind the priest’s house.

Given the harsh times, his serious obligations, and his work ethic, “some part of his mind was always tense.” He nevertheless possesses a pensive side:

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.

This brings up his third vulnerability: his marriage. Though outwardly happy, the bond between him and his wife, Eileen, is not without its fissures. When they met, he “was attracted to her shiny black hair and slate eyes, her practical, agile mind.” Over time, that practical mind has found fault with Furlong’s more sympathetic, sentimental nature, his tendency to feel sorry for those whom Eileen believes “only have themselves to blame.” But tension between them has an additional element.

It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper:  they could … read your mind. He’d had moments, in his marriage, when he’d almost feared Eileen and envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts … Furlong felt that he was poor company for her, that he seldom made a long night shorter. Did she ever imagine how her life would be if she had married another?

At times during the night, as he lies awake beside his sleeping wife, he goes over “small things like these,” the differences between them, and his fears that the slightest turn for the worse could change everything forever.

And it isn’t just Eileen for whom he imagines a different life, a different marriage. Early one morning, while delivering coal to a house, he encounters a young governess who treats him kindly as she prepares breakfast for the children under her care:

He stood for a moment taking in the peace of that plain room, letting a part of his mind turn loose to stray off and imagine what it might be like to live there, in that house with her as his wife. Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life, elsewhere, and wondered if this was not something in his blood; might his own father not have been one of those who had upped, suddenly, and taken the boat for England? It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

Setup: Locale

The Ireland republic of this time is conservative and Catholic. The iconic emblem of that ethos, and its effect on the local townspeople, resides in one building in particular:

The convent was a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river with black, wide-open gates and a host of tall, shining windows, facing the town.

The Good Shepherd nuns, in charge of the convent, ran a training school there for girls, providing them with a basic education. They also ran a laundry business. Little was known about the training school, but the laundry had a good reputation.

There was other talk, too, about the place. Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night. The local nurse had told that she’d been called out to treat a fifteen-year-old with varicose veins from standing so long at the wash-tubs.

Others claimed that it was the nuns themselves who worked their fingers to the bone, knitting Aran jumpers and threading rosary beads for export, that they had hearts of gold and problems with their eyes, and weren’t allowed to speak, only to pray, that some were fed no more than bread and butter for half the day but were allowed a hot dinner in the evenings, once their work was done.

Others swore the place was no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth, saying it was their own people who had put them in there after their illegitimates had been adopted out to rich Americans, or sent off to Australia, that the nuns got good money by placing these babies out foreign, that it was an industry they had going.

But people said lots of things – and a good half of what was said could not be believed; never was there any shortage of idle minds or gossips about town.

The First Incident

With Christmas approaching, Furlong is delivering a load of coal and logs to the convent. When no one answers at the front door, he makes his way to another entrance.

He’s carried on to a small, lighted chapel where he found more than a dozen young women and girls, down on their hands and knees, with tins of old-fashioned lavender polish and rags, polishing their hearts out in circles on the floor. As soon as they saw him, they looked like they’d been scalded –just over him coming in and asking for Sister Carmel, and was she about? And not one of them with shoes on but going around in black socks and some horrid type of grey-colored shifts. One girl had an ugly stye in her eye, and another’s hair had been roughly cut, as though someone blind had taken to it with shears.

It was she who came up to him. ‘Mister, won’t you help us? … Just take me as far as the river … Or you could just let me out at the gate.’

The girl is “dead in earnest and the accent was Dublin.” Furlong tells her he can’t take her anywhere.

’‘Take me home with you, then. I’ll work til I drop for ya, sir.’

‘Haven’t I five girls and a wife at home.’

‘Well, I’ve nobody – and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?’

Suddenly, she dropped to her knees and started polishing – and Furlong turned to see a nun standing down at the confession box. ‘Sister,’ Furlong said. ‘I was just looking for Sister Carmel.’

The nun realizes who he is, arranges for the coal and logs to be delivered, checks the invoice to be sure it matches what’s been unloaded, and pays Furlong. He takes stock of her as she’s counting out the notes: “She put him in mind of a strong, spoiled pony who’d for too long been given her own way.”

The First Incident’s Intensification of a Key Vulnerability

That night, Furlong tells Eileen what he saw. She is less than receptive, thinking he is once again putting his sympathies where they do not belong:

‘Where does thinking get us? All thinking does is bring us down. If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.’

This of course counters Furlong’s wondering what life might be like if we just had time to reflect. But as the argument intensifies, Eileen brings up his mother obliquely:

“There’s girls out there that get in trouble, that much you do know.’

Something small and hard gathered in his throat then which he tried but felt unable to voice or swallow. In the finish, he could neither swallow it down nor find any words to ease what had come between them.

‘I’d no call to say that to you, Bill,’ Eileen cooled. ‘But if we just mind what we have here and stay on the right side of people and soldier on, none of ours will ever have to endure the likes of what them girls go through. Those were put in there because they hadn’t a soul in this world to care for them. All their people did was leave them wild and then, when they got into trouble, they turned their backs. It’s only people with no children that can afford to be careless.’

‘But what if it was one of ours?’Furlong said.

‘This is the very thing I’m saying,’ she said, rising again. ‘Tis not one of ours.’

‘Isn’t it a good job Mrs Wilson didn’t share your ideas?’ Furlong looked at her. ‘Where would my mother have gone? Where would I be now?’

‘Weren’t Mrs Wilson’s cares far from any of ours?’ Eileen said. ‘Sitting out in that big house with her pension and a farm of land and your mother and Ned working under her. Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?

This dispute remains unresolved, an open wound, as the story proceeds. But the psychological and emotional link between what happened to Furlong’s mother and his feelings for the girls at the convent are established.

The Second, Decisive Incident

Before daylight on the Sunday before Christmas, Furlong is delivering another load of fuel to the convent:

When he let down the tail board and went to open the coal house door, the bolt was stiff with frost … As soon as he forced this bolt, he sensed something within but many a dog he’d found in a coal shed with no decent place to lie. He couldn’t properly see and was obliged to go back to the lorry, for the torch. When he shone it on what was there, he judged, by what was on the floor [excrement], that the girl within had been there for longer than the night. ‘Christ,’ he said. The only thing he thought to do was to take his coat off. When he did, and went to put it round her, she cowered.

He helps the girl to his truck where she warms herself against the hood. For a moment, given the rough cut of her hair, he thinks this may be the same girl he encountered previously who had asked to be taken away, but realizes this is a different girl. He finally is able to ease her away and take her to the convent’s front door:

Before long, the door opened and a young nun looked out. ‘Oh!’ She let a little cry, and quickly shut it. The girl at his side said nothing but stood staring at the door, as though she might burn a hole through it with her eyes.

They’re standing in the cold for a good long while, and he tells himself he could take her to the priest’s house or even home, “but she was such a small, shut-down thing, and once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home.”

This battle within him is cut short when the girl discloses a terrible truth:

‘Won’t you ask them about my baby? He must be hungry,’ she said. ‘And who is there to feed him now? … He’s fourteen weeks old. They’ve taken him from me now, but they might let me feed him again, if he’s here. I don’t know where he is.’

When the door reopens, it’s the Mother Superior standing there, “a tall woman [Furlong] recognised from the chapel but had seldom dealt with.” After greeting Furlong and taking note of his being there so early on a Sunday, she remarks:

‘I’m just sorry you’ve had to encounter this,’ she said, before turning on the girl. “Where were you?’ she changed. ‘We’re not long after finding you weren’t in your bed. We were about to call the Gardaí.”

This would appear to be an obvious lie. How will Furlong respond?

‘The girl was locked in your shed all night… Whatever had her there.’

Mother Superior is unfazed by his remark.

‘God love you, child. Come in and get yourself upstairs and into a hot bath. You’ll catch your end. This poor girl can’t tell night from day sometimes. Whatever way we are going to mind her, I don’t know.’

The girl stood in a type of trance, and had begun to shake.

The stark contrast between how Furlong found the girl, what he suspects happened given her statement about her baby, and the Mother Superior’s deceit and her expressions of concern set up the key tension of what follows: What is the truth of what’s happening? Will it come out? What will happen to the girl—or him—given his discovery of her locked away in the coal shed?

The concern for himself is not merely speculative—the Mother Superior refuses to let him leave just yet. She offers him tea, which he attempts to forego:

‘Ah, I’ll not,’ Furlong stepped back—as though the step could take him back into the time before this.

‘You’ll come in,’  she said. ‘I’ll not have it otherwise.’

‘There’s a hurry on me, Mother. I’ve yet to go home and change for Mass.’

‘Then you’ll come in until the hurry goes off you. Tis early yet – and more than one Mass is being said today.’

It becomes clear her intention in keeping him there is both to continue the charade of concern for the girl and to let Furlong know she’s aware of his background and his family situation—and thus his vulnerabilities:

‘So, is all well at home, Billy?’ she began. Her eyes were neither blue nor grey but somewhere in between.

‘All’s well with us, thank you, Mother.’

‘And your girls? How are they? I hear that two of yours are making some progress with their music lessons here. And don’t you have another two next door.’

‘They’re getting on rightly, thank God.’

The risk to his daughters established should he make any trouble for the convent, she sticks the knife in further:

‘But it must be disappointing, all the same.’Her back was to him.

‘Disappointing?’ Furlong said. ‘In what way?’

‘To have no boy to carry on the name.’

She meant business but Furlong, who’d long experience of such talk, was on known ground. He stretched a little and let his boot touch the brass, polished fender.

‘Sure, didn’t I take my own mother’s name, Mother. And never any harm did it do me…What have I against girls? My own mother was a girl, once. And I dare say the same must be true of you and all belonging to us.’

There’s a pause between them then, with Furlong suspecting she is not so much put off as changing tack, then the girl reappears. She’s wearing a blouse, cardigan, and pleated skirt with shoes on her feet and her hair still damp from being washed and badly combed out. Furlong asks how she is but the Mother Superior cuts her off, telling her to sit and have tea and cake, which the girl accepts nervously—so much so her hand shakes when she tries to set the cup back down on its saucer.

The Mother Superior chats idly about the news and more unimportant things, then turns to the girl and asks her how she came to be in the coal shed.

‘All you need do is tell us. You’re not in any trouble.’

The girl froze in her chair.

‘Who put you in there?’

The girl’s frightened gaze went all around, touched Furlong’s briefly before falling back to the table and the crumbs on her plate.

‘They hid me, Mother.’

‘Hid you how?’

“Weren’t we only playing.’

‘Playing? Playing what, would you like to tell us.’

‘Just playing, Mother.’

‘Hide and seek, I dare say. And at your age. Did they not to think to tell you when the game was over?’

The girl looked away and let out an unearthly type of sob.

‘What ails you now, child? Wasn’t it all just a big mistake? Wasn’t it all just a big nothing?’

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was a big nothing, Mother.’

‘You’ve had a fright, is all. What you need now is a breakfast and a good long sleep.’

The girl is sent away to have her breakfast prepared with the young nun who opened the door. Furlong senses, now that the presentation is over, the Mother Superior wants him gone. But his previous desire to leave has been replaced by “a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground. He was, after all, the man among women here.’

The Mother Superior plays along for a while but eventually, having enough, pulls an envelope from her pocket—not what he’s owed for the coal, she’ll expect an invoice for that, but “something for Christmas.” Furlong reluctantly takes it, and is then led through the kitchen, where the young nun is preparing breakfast of duck eggs and black pudding. The girl is sitting “in a type of daze at the table, with nothing before her.”

Despite knowing the nuns want him to leave, he again succumbs to his contrariness and stops to chat with the girl. He asks her name and is told it is Enda. He responds that that is a boy’s name and asks her real name. ‘Sarah,’ she replies, and he tells her that was his own mother’s name.

He then asks where she is from, and how she came to be at the convent. The young nun coughs and gives her frying pan “a rough shake,” a signal for the girl not to answer. He then tells her his own name, where he can be found, and that if there’s anything she needs, all she has to do is come down or send for him. The nun plates the eggs and pudding but does not serve them to the girl. Furlong heads for the front door, and when he pulls it closed behind him, he hears someone inside, turning the key.

Let’s Discuss

There’s so much more that’s excellent about this novel. Although I’ve had to condense it a great deal, I hope the excerpts I’ve chosen convey the tension I felt as I read it the first time. Also, in the spirit of not providing spoilers, I’ve mentioned nothing about where these scenes lead and how the novel ends, though it does so powerfully.

I’m not going to lay out in detail how or why this final scene works so well—rather, I’d like us to discuss that in the comments. Specifically:

What factors do you think make the scene inside the convent so menacing despite no overt violence? What is the threat that creates the tension? Who is at risk? What will happen to the young woman next? What might happen to Furlong since he’s offered her his assistance?

How does Furlong’s background affect the suspense—does it intensify it? Distract from it? Give it a layer of meaning it would otherwise lack?

How does his interaction with the Mother Superior reflect on what he thinks of women in general with their “canny intuitions,” or what he thinks about his wife in particular, “her mettle, her red-hot instincts?” Do these beliefs affect our sense of what’s happening in the scene in the convent, or how Furlong interprets them?

How does Furlong’s turn to “contrariness” and a refusal to leave affect the tension—does it intensify it? If so, how? Why? If not, same questions.

How much does prior knowledge about the Magdalene Laundries, the mother-and-baby homes, the “Cruelty Men” who collected children from poor families to work in the industrial schools, and other Irish Catholic scandals under Ireland’s 60-year theocracy, inform your sense of menace in the scenes described? Do you need that foreknowledge to feel fully the underlying threat in the scenes?