I feel like I’m always forgetting where I hear about books. This is another one of those cases. I put a hold on Say Nothing at he library at some point, and by the time it came in, the specific impetus for doing so had vanished. In such cases, I tend to trust my past self’s judgement—we tend to have similar tastes—and I did so again here.
Say Nothing is a history of a large event and a mystery about a small event (small in global terms; to those involved it was devastating). The history concerns the Troubles, which roiled Northern Ireland from the late sixties until the late nineties. The mystery is what happened to a woman named Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten who, on a night in 1972, was abducted form her home and never seen again. That she was murdered was never seriously in question, but the absence of a body was an abscess in the minds of her children, a puckered wound in their hearts that refused to close and thereby seal the certainty of their mother’s demise.
The two stories intertwine, with McConville’s disappearance a thread singled out from the broader tapestry of the Troubles. Keefe does a good job juggling both subjects, giving a brisk but thorough summary of the causes that led to the troubles, the struggles of the paramilitaries with the authorities and each other, and the eventual peace process that brought the bloodshed to a halt while undermining its meaning, a decision that caused no shortage of resentment among the IRA faithful.
Keefe’s interest is clearly with people over events, and he frames much of the history though specific stories, including those of Dolours and Marian Price, sisters whose violent exploits made them IRA darlings and media fodder; Brendan Hughes, an IRA footsoldier and gifted tactician with an uncompromising view of Irish nationalism; and Gerry Adams, one of the heads of the Provisional IRA (though never admitting as much) whose pivot to politics with Sinn Fein brought peace to Northern Ireland while leaving those who fought feeling abandoned and bitter.
The focus of the book is clearly with the nationalists, as unionist voices are relegated to villainous bit parts, but this is more due to focus than polemics. Keefe paints the IRA neither as purely cold-blooded killers or revolutionary heroes, but as normal men and women whose convictions and circumstances led them to commit unlawful and occasionally violent acts. His final weighing of the fat of Jean McConville is not a stone cold certainty, but he presents a credible argument as to who killed her and why, and helps refute the claim that her “touting (or informing) was the cause. A good book.