He believed the novel represented the highest form of expression so far attained. One of many to have given their take on why the novel matters is DH Lawrence.

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And that – bringing to life what is there, teasing it forth, as if from underneath the conceptions that so firmly hold it in their grasp – is something only the novel can do. No one in Keegan’s novel talks about the good in people, it’s just something that occurs, nameless and ordinary. If goodness is a light, then it’s not a powerful beam exposing a social reality, as in Dostoevsky, but a weak, flickering flame. It is vague, fleeting, elusive – in Bill Furlong it manifests itself in a thought here, a small action there. The goodness we encounter in Small Things Like These is of a quite different character. The Idiot is a novel of ideas, or, as Dostoevsky himself called it, fantastic realism. In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, goodness as an idea takes on physical existence in the figure of Prince Myshkin, the absolute example of the good person, and gains its force in the collision between the ideal and the real. And in many ways Small Things Like These is a novel about goodness. But the thing about Bill Furlong, which he perhaps isn’t aware of himself, is that he’s a good man. Sometimes he feels life is running through his hands. He works hard, but the family is struggling. Furlong is a coal merchant, a married man with five daughters. What do we get near to in Small Things Like These? The novel, set in a small Irish town, follows the thoughts and perceptions of Bill Furlong.

Reading is nearness we read to get near to something. After a while I got to my feet and vanished into the daily round, the impressions the novel had made on me slowly dwindling until there was barely anything left other than a certain feeling that came over me when I turned my thoughts to it. When I finished it, I remained in my chair with the book lowered in my lap for a few minutes, completely filled by its emotions and moods. It’s a short novel and I read it in the space of a couple of hours. The last time I experienced that sensation was last winter after reading Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. I recognise that quote so well, especially when it comes to literature. Of course there’s nothing remarkable about that – only he then added: and put me down somewhere else. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that music could lift him up.

Small things like these review