There was a touch of serendipity to my coming to read this book. I finished a publishing job at lunchtime, the sun came out, I decided to head down to the high street and take a walk along the Thames. Then I thought, well, it would be nice to grab an afternoon coffee somewhere but I need something to read … so I headed into Waterstone’s and it was Claire Keegan’s book that took my eye from the pile on the table. It looked familiar; maybe I’d read it before? But no, I hadn’t. It was published in 2021 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. It’s short – a mere 116 pages – but as we all know, small can be beautiful and this book was so stunningly good that when I finished it last night just before bedtime, I was left in awe of its power and took my thoughts about it to bed with me.

Set in Ireland in 1985 in the run-up to Christmas, the weather is bitter. Keegan’s opening beautifully  evokes the season: ‘In October there were yellow trees. Then … the long November winds came … and stripped the trees bare … the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. The people … unhappily endured the weather.’ 

We meet Bill Furlong, a coal merchant, and it’s his busiest time of year. Bill, we are told, ‘came from nothing’. His mother fell pregnant at the age of 16 and when her family disown her, her employer, a widow Mrs Wilson, keeps her on as a domestic in her large house on the edge of town and gives her and her baby, born in April 1946, a home. Mrs Wilson takes the growing Bill under her wing, teaching him to read and continuing to give him a home when his mother dies while he’s still young. Later, when Bill marries Eileen, Mrs Wilson gives them a generous amount of money to get them started in their life together, and they go on to have five daughters.

The generous, kind and unprejudiced behaviour of Mrs Wilson to Bill and his mother lies at the heart of this story and shapes Bill’s choices. It’s based on the real history of the Magdalene laundries, run by Roman Catholic institutions, where pregnant women, or women seen as promiscuous, were incarcerated for life, made to work for no money and were appallingly treated. They operated from 1922 until – quite shockingly – 1996.

At the beginning of the book, Bill is ‘disinclined to dwell on the past’. He’s attracted to Eileen’s ‘practical, agile mind’ but we soon see that she’s less forgiving of poverty than Bill and scolds him when he gives money or free coal to those in need. When they disagree on things like this, he lies awake at night ‘going over small things like these‘. These ‘small things’ are a seed though and an incident will cause Bill mental turmoil as he struggles with a moral choice and is forced to look at his past. 

When making a delivery to the local convent, which has a laundry, he finds himself in a small chapel and sees girls scrubbing the floor on their hands and knees. One of them begs him to help her escape; she would rather drown herself in the nearby river than stay there. But then he’s distracted by one of the nuns coming and is taken away. However, he can’t forget the experience and it plays on his mind. The next time he finds a girl in the coal shed, obviously left there as a punishment, and takes her to the house. The Mother Superior glosses over it, suggests it was all a mistake and makes a show of being kind to the girl. Bill doesn’t believe it though. He’s now confronted with his own past, the knowledge that if it hadn’t been for Mrs Wilson, then his own mother would have been treated like this girl and what would have happened to him.

The locals hear about the incident and it’s obvious that they won’t accept him challenging the nuns. It’s clear everyone knows what goes on at the laundry but the nuns are generous and no one wants to upset them. Eileen doesn’t want him to do anything. She cruelly reminds him of his background which is seen as shameful and tells him that he risks their girls not getting into the covent’s highly acclaimed school if he upsets the nuns.

Bill is painfully torn between his own life’s history, his distress at what he’s witnessed and his wife’s and the locals’ desires not to upset the nuns. ‘He felt the strain of being alive … It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.’

He’s drawn back to the convent on Christmas Eve, finds another girl in distress in the coal shed … what is he to do? Can he turn his back on what he’s uncovered or must he do something regardless of the consequences? ‘… he found himself asking, was there any point in being alive without helping one another?’

Bill’s story is simply but elegantly told and its power lies not only in the truth of the story of the laundries, but Keegan’s sharp understanding of how life’s experiences shape us and can cause moral turmoil as we question what’s right and where our loyalties lie.

‘The result,’ says the Telegraph, ‘is a truly exquisite, tenderly hopeful Christmas tale in which compassion and altruism triumph over apathy and inertia.’ 

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