Source of book: Audiobook from the library
I decided to listen to this one after my wife recommended it. She mentioned that it had made an impression on some of the members of her knitting guild book club. I make an effort to read books my wife recommends so we can talk about them later. (Same for my brother and a number of friends. If they recommend it, it is usually good.)
Small Things Like These is really short. In the audiobook version, it was under two hours, so either a novella, or perhaps somewhere in the middle between a short story and a novella.
That said, it packs a lot in there. You really feel like you get to know the protagonist, Bill Furlong, quite well, understanding his emotions and motivations. It also is tightly plotted, with nothing that is not needed, and everything that is. It’s good writing.
It helps in understanding the book if you know something about the Magdalene Laundries. These were institutions run first by Protestant organizations, but later by Catholic ones as well. They were ostensibly meant to be homes for unwed mothers, prostitutes, and other women cast out by their families and society.
In practice, many of them were closer to prison camps, using slave labor for a profit. In many cases, they took in laundry, which was washed by the inmates in deplorable conditions, for no wages other than meagre food and board.
Not every home for unwed mothers was like this, although all suffered from the basic problem of being a band-aid on deeper social problems such as poverty, domestic violence, rape, and lack of economic opportunity for women.
This book bases its laundry, from what I can tell, on High Park, which was located in a former convent and run by the nuns. In 1993, a mass grave of infants and women was discovered, leading to a UN investigation and eventually an apology from the government. (Although no compensation was ever paid to the victims or their families.)
It is difficult to fathom in some ways, but some of these institutions were still in business in the 1980s, when this book is set. That’s well into my lifetime.
The problems, as I noted, run far deeper than individual abuses. The problem is societal and social, cultural and religious, economic and predatory. It stems from a belief that women are to blame for having sex without being properly owned by a man. Even though heterosexual sex requires a man as well, he is left without consequences in many cases, unless he chooses to do the ethical thing himself. The woman is blamed for the sex.
Likewise, prostitution requires more than just a “wayward” female. And yet the criminal consequences are imposed on the woman. I highly recommend reading up on the ways that criminalization of sex work has all kinds of negative impact on vulnerable people, and why it should be thus decriminalized. A good place to start is this short list from Human Rights Watch. The fundamental error is the belief that some forms of economic exchange of sex are fine - marrying for money, for example (or anyone marrying Jabba the Trump) - but others are not. It is as much a vestige of class exploitation as the “hunting for sport as a rich person is great, hunting for food as a poor person is poaching” issue in the Europe of the past.
Ultimately, the abuse will be inevitable if women are blamed for sex. Suffering will be inevitable as long as single parents are denied meaningful opportunity to support themselves. And that means all of them, not just the economically privileged ones. And we will never eliminate the abuse as long as we treat sex, pregnancy, and sex work from a moral framework - based on punishing women - rather than as social symptoms of deeper problems - that implicate predatory males far more than women.
The story is simple enough. Bill Furlong is a man who has risen just a bit above poverty, to the point of moderate comfort for himself and his family. He is a hard worker, a good man, and a tender heart.
He also has a history. His mother was unwed when she became pregnant with him. Her family disowned her, and she likely would have ended up in one of the laundries. Except that her employer, the not-particularly-rich-but-could-afford-a-servant Mrs. Wilson, chose to keep her on in employment. Indeed, after his mother died prematurely, Mrs. Wilson pretty much raised him herself.
Because of this, Bill had a good life, and was able to find good employment as an adult.
Right before one Christmas, however, Bill makes a coal delivery to the local laundry, and finds a young woman who has been locked in the coal shed overnight. He suspects that the claims that she got there herself are false, particularly since she is asking about her baby who was taken away from her.
I won’t go any further than that, but Bill is put in a terrible dilemma. He knows that he will likely suffer social punishment if he pokes the bear, but he also can’t bear the idea that someone like his mother could be treated that way.
The book spends a good bit of time inside Bill’s head, as he has to figure out what - if anything - he is able to do to make life better for at least one person.
There is something particularly timely about this book, I think. Most of us have limited power individually. And those of us, like Bill, who are in a tenuous position economically, have limited options. Perhaps the best thing to keep in mind is that anyone who has the money or social power to act absolutely should. And not look down on those who may not have the resources to do as much.
There is definitely an ongoing resurgence of regressive behavior, intent on punishing the vulnerable for their oppression, punishing the poor for their poverty, publishing women for being female, publishing minorities for not being white.
Our strength is in numbers here, but we also have individual choices to make. We may not be able to take down the new versions of the Magdalene Laundries, but perhaps we can help one vulnerable person find freedom.
Small Things Like These is a good short read, with good writing and a tender heart. A good thing for us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment