At the urging of a friend, I read this fictionalized account of one man’s shocked awakening to the hidden horrors of the Magdalen Laundries. Of course I had read the journalistic exposés about the cruel exploitation of unwed mothers by a particular order of nuns. But the novel addresses a thornier question: how could an entire town have remained willfully ignorant, or at least unwilling to act? Claire Keegan sets the narrative in 1985, a time of great economic hardship in Ireland. Her protagonist, Bill, is a decent, hardworking man, making an honest but precarious living as a coal merchant, providing for his church-going wife and five daughters, in a tight-knit community where the nuns are figures of power and wealth. The novel is very short, but Keegan takes her time laying out the daily details of Bill’s family and work life, relaying the exchanges in the local patois, to make a point. An ordinary man, not a hero or a rebel, must make a stand. One of the pleasures of this novel is the occasional unexpected image: a woman’s hair is neither red nor brown, but the colour of cinnamon. If I have a nit to pick, it is that the dialogue can sound too expository to be natural. And there is a puzzling episode: Bill happens upon an unknown neighbor in her nightgown, and experiences fleeting desire for her. Is it meant to emphasize that he is no saint? But that aside, how is it that, in this tight-knit community, he has no idea who the woman and her family in the house across the road are?
