With Claire Keegan’s renowned, Booker-Prize-shortlisted novel recently being adapted into an award-winning film starring the talented Irish actor Cillian Murphy, I felt compelled to share my thoughts on this masterpiece of Irish literature.
While this short but stunning text may not be a thrilling, action-packed ‘page-turner’, its beauty lies in its deep emotional resonance.
Against the backdrop of a bleak Irish winter in the 1980s, she comments on what it means to live an ordinary life in a world embedded in so much suffering. We follow along as coal merchant Bill Furlong goes about his everyday life, delivering coal to the village’s residents. At the same time, he reflects on his own childhood, and we are taken through a series of flashbacks, as Bill remembers the kindness that he and his young mother received from the benevolent Mrs Wilson, who took in the two lost souls at a time when they needed it most.
Flashing forward to his current life, Bill is faced with the difficult decision between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing, when he witnesses the horrific treatment that the young girls, many of whom are single mothers, are facing in one of the now-infamous Magdalene Laundries, institutions led by the Roman Catholic Church in late 20th century Ireland. These institutions were set up to be safe homes for “fallen women” – such as sex workers, single mothers, rape victims, and others – but were revealed to be using their residents for free labour in unsafe working conditions.
Having experienced great compassion from Mr Wilson in his young life, Bill feels a compulsion to show this same compassion to others, despite the negative fallout that this may have on his family. Due to the long-standing power dynamics in the town, where the church dictates everything, what people think of you matters greatly. Therefore, he struggles between his own sense of his social responsibility, and the culture of passivity in the town where, as his wife Eileen puts it, ‘If you want to get on in this life, there are things you’ve got to ignore’.
Bill initially appears to us to be a quiet, soft-spoken family man, perhaps not your stereotypical bold and daring hero. Throughout the tale, Bill has been reservedly wallowing in his own misery, fuelled by a feeling of helplessness. Therefore, his eventual decision to break out of his thoughtful reverence and take a stand by taking one of the affected girls into the safety and warmth of his own home, sparks a new kind of hope and faith in the goodness of humanity.
This being one of my favourite reads this year, which has stayed with me in a way few do, I was inevitably nervous when going to the cinema to experience the novel’s translation onto the big screen. However, I was deeply moved by Tim Mierlant’s take on the story, which stayed true to its origins and did not attempt to dramatise the plot in a way that would take away from the key message that Claire Keegan is sharing with us.
In a film review by Emma Kiely in the Collider, she aptly notes that Mierlant perfectly captures how this was intended as a ‘Dark portrait of Irish life’, stepping away from the common media misrepresentation of Ireland as being ‘a jovial, welcoming and mostly harmless territory’. This stereotypical image overlooks the sheer amount of suffering and religious unrest that the Irish have faced. Therefore, Keegan’s story, and Tim Mierlant’s movie film adaptation, is vitally important, as it sheds a light on the long history of horrific sins carried out in the name of religion, while also exploring the protagonist’s internal conflict between right and wrong. She speaks to the importance of small acts of quiet heroism in sparking change and clearing the path to a better world.
Featured image: Dahlia Akhaine via Pixels