My year was bookended by two novels. In January, I read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Wiling away the days of a third lockdown was a perfect time for this meditation on loneliness and listlessness. In December I read Claire Keegan’s latest novella, Small Things Like These.
I tend to find new year’s resolutions needlessly contrived. Is regulated and time-stamped self-improvement really the path to greater enlightenment? I certainly have my doubts. But in 2022, thanks to Hemingway and Keegan, I have vowed to spend more time reading fiction.
Keegan’s first work in over a decade concerns Bill Furlong, a timber merchant living in New Ross, Co Wexford, in the run-up to Christmas 1985. He is kind and the locals are generous. His life is narrow and ordered and his children are well-raised. But physically looming on the edge of town is a convent, and lurking in the moral shadows of the residents’ lives are the horrors of the Magdalene laundries.
Fiction wields a unique power when it comes to explaining the way we live, where we came from and perhaps even where we are headed
There are myriad ways to tell the story of the world. Economists and sociologists do it by representing complicated data in ways for lay people to understand. British journalist Sathnam Sanghera investigates Britain’s imperial past, and its knock-on effects, in his heartfelt book Empireland. Fintan O’Toole’s personal history of Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is an authoritative and oftentimes moving exploration of the island and the vertiginous changes it has undergone.
But fiction wields a unique power when it comes to explaining the way we live, where we came from and perhaps even where we are headed. When the protagonist of Small Things Like These encounters an ailing woman in search of her missing baby, he is confronted with a dilemma: does he heed his wife’s advice – that to exist happily in life we must turn a blind eye to certain things – and move on? Or will he become overwhelmed by a Christian duty to do the right thing?
Blind eye turned
This is a story greater than just one man grappling with his personal responsibility. It tells us much more about how a town idly turned a blind eye to the convent on its outskirts. And it asks the question: behind a face of conviviality and kindness, were some bystanders in Ireland perniciously complicit in the laundries?
In just a few pages, Keegan relates one of the darkest aspects of this country’s history – and not just the facts or figures or data-driven social forces or the top-down intervention of religious institutions. But the private motivations and intimate fears and psychologies of all concerned, whether centrally involved or adjacent. Of course it does not matter if Furlong or his wife are real – fiction is a better vehicle to understanding and coming to terms with these aspects of the story than anything else.
It's why we take walking tours of Dublin in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom to see where the events of Ulysses unfolded, even though of course none of them did
And just as it allows us to understand and interrogate ourselves better, it allows us to understand each other better too, uniting us behind universals. Keegan might be telling the story of rural Ireland in the 1980s, but there cannot be many societies which have never once grappled with questions of personal versus collective responsibility, what it means to be good, and the things we owe to one another.
Mostly fiction endures because we want to believe in it. We know Harry Potter isn’t real, and we are even more sure that platform nine and three-quarters in King’s Cross Station in London is not a portal to a secret world accessible only by wizards. Yet thousands flock to see it every year. Or, it’s why we take walking tours of Dublin in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom to see where the events of Ulysses unfolded, even though of course none of them did.
Reality and falsehood
We know the characters and stories are fake but our feelings and thoughts about them are no less real because of that. In a world that is currently hyper-fixated on delineating the harsh boundary between reality and falsehood – with entire media units set up to counter disinformation, and conspiracy-busting becoming a full-time profession – we should not lose sight of the fact that truth can be found in all sorts of places, so long as we know how to look.
The year 2021 – much like 2020 – was where we were confronted with some harsh realities about ourselves: the limits of our kindness, the breaking point of our frustrations. But also our seemingly endless capacity for ingenuity and levity and humour. But any year that begins with the storming of the Capitol in Washington DC, encouraged by a sitting president, is certainly a fertile moment for a little bit of self-reflection.
And there are avenues for that outside of convention. A lot of effort has been placed in disentangling truth from the reams of false information that flies around social media. And a complicated burden placed on tech platforms to isolate and purge untruths.
In such a heady atmosphere, this kind of work is important. And the professionality and reliability of traditional media more valuable than ever. But perhaps the stories we tell about ourselves matter just as much too.