Small Things Like These

There's a very old Jewish teaching which says "whoever saves a life, saves an entire world." This gentle and reflective novella, in which nothing much happens and yet lives change, is a version of this, told through the details of the quiet life of a man in an Irish village.

this slim but tightly packed novel has more indictments than you'd expect: of the Catholic church, of capitulation, of women, of class in itself. It is, indeed, shocking that the Magdalena laundries were still in use in the 80's and 90's (and I've seen Peter Mullan movie!) and this book brings it home that one class of people is not oppressed without the tacit complicity of the whole. "There but for the Grace of God" can be a shorthand for gratitude and silence, or empathy and action. It is reminiscent of the films where local Germans were brought in to see the pile of shoes and hair in the death camps and they all cried: We didn't know!

well, we know. we always know.