Tags
20th century history, Belfast, journalist, memory, non-fiction, Northern Ireland, The Troubles, true crime, truth
When I was in high school, I did an independent study project exploring the idea of memory and oral storytelling in relation to the Troubles. I interviewed several Northern Irish expats living in Houston and even some in Northern Ireland who spoke with me via e-mail. Though a few people never responded to my requests for interviews, I was lucky that my connections meant that most people I reached out to or was introduced to were willing to talk to me, and, at the time, I didn’t realize how strange that was. I did understand that I needed to tread carefully as I asked about their experiences of growing up in Northern Ireland and the divisions of life from the pre-Troubles 1940’s through the early 2000’s. I prepared for my interviews meticulously, even submitting the transcripts of my recorded conversations to the interview subjects to ensure that I had captured our conversations accurately. However, I didn’t really understand why I needed to be so careful. Just this morning as I was going through my room at my parents’ house, I found the final project and several of my interview transcripts. Flipping through them, I’m still proud of the work I did, but I wish I’d had Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe’s searing account of the disappearance of Jean McConnville and the impact of the Troubles on Northern Ireland, to help better ground my understanding of the context that my gracious interviewees were speaking from in 2004, just 5 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreements.
In Say Nothing, Keefe uses housewife and mother Jean McConnville’s disappearance and her children’s search for answers as the backbone of a larger exploration of the development and evolution of the Provisional IRA (or Provos) during the Troubles, starting from the late 1960’s to the present day, through the people who started the organization and rose through its ranks. He also details the connected rise of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Provos led by Gerry Adams, and it’s often tense relationship with the more paramilitary-focused Provos. Keefe is particularly interested in why people committed horrible acts, the oppressive culture of silence in Northern Ireland, and the country as a prime example of collective denial or “the stories that communities tell themselves in order to cope with tragic or transgressive events” (Keefe, 340).
Keefe does something remarkable here. He writes a book about the Troubles from the perspective of “the terrorists”, those who lived and fought, something unimaginable even 10 years ago. His account is wide and as all-encompassing as it can be, pulling in first hand accounts and interviews with key players and their family and friends as much as possible. He highlights key people and events like Dolours and Marian Price, Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Boston College’s failed Belfast Project. He wanders quite a bit from Jean McConnville’s story, sometimes to the point that I thought he had just about lost that thread, and then he’d bring her back into the narrative in a tight, effective way. In doing this, he allows us to both see the humanity of those involved in the fight against Britain without ever letting the horror of their acts disappear from our minds. Keefe does a beautiful job creating sympathy for the self-described soldiers of the Provisional IRA, particularly in the face of Gerry Adams’ perceived betrayal with the Good Friday Agreement and disavowal of his IRA roots. Yet Keefe also portrays Adams in a balanced way: both as the ice cold leader who ordered the violence of the Provos and the savvy statesman who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement, bringing a tentative peace to Northern Ireland. Keefe’s treatment of his major players reveals the complexity and nuance of the choices they made and the role information, or lack of it, played in undermining, justifying, and cementing those choices for both themselves and others.
Keefe is a long-form journalist, having written for The New Yorker, and his skill with pacing out a story translates extremely well to book-length. His pacing never sags, nor does the book feel like a series of articles slapped together into book form. He stays focused on this subjects and themes without losing a thread; even when he strays from McConnville, he is firmly rooted in his exploration of the Provos, memory, and truth. Truth is at the center of the narrative–what truths get you killed, what truths allow you to live, what truths allow you to live with yourself. A colleague of mine who read the book around the same time I did (and whose family is Irish) wondered if everyone had just told the truth from the beginning, would Northern Ireland experienced so many decades of violence and horror? And the challenge in answering that question is exactly what Keefe explores: because of the culture of silence fostered by the country’s religious and economic backgrounds and the years of collective denial employed by communities all over, no one alive really knows the entire truth of the Troubles, even if they adamantly think they do. So the question becomes what is the actual truth and what is the truth we tell ourselves? And when does the difference matter?
Say Nothing is absolutely the best non-fiction I’ve read in a long time. I highly recommend it. Compassionate and objective, as contradictory as those characteristics sometimes seem, Keefe shines a light on a bit of history mired in secrets, half-truths, and memory that is utterly compelling. It is also a timely read as we wrap up 2020, hoping for a better 2021, to remind us of the dangers of collective denial in societal memory.