Say Nothing

"Jean McConville was thirty-eight when she disappeared, and she had spent nearly half her life either pregnant or recovering from childbirth. She brought fourteen children to term and lost four of them, leaving her with ten kids who ranged in age from Anne, who was twenty, to Billy and Jim, the sweet-eyed twins, who were six." So begins the story that Patrick Radden Keefe tells in Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder And Memory In Northern Ireland, which though the McConville kidnapping is the thread that is woven through the narrative, is a book that has a much larger theme: it's a comprehensive look at "The Troubles" of Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the present.

There are a handful of major characters. The Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, who were imprisoned for a bombing in London, and went on hunger strikes; Brendan Hughes, an IRA figure who Keefe writes, "He thought of going out and getting into gunfights the way other people thought about getting up and going to the office," and Gerry Adams, who was the public face of Irish resistance as head of the political organization, Sinn Fein, but was also a member of the IRA (although he has always denied it, since it was and still is illegal to be a member) and also ordered several crimes, including the London bombing and the disappearing of Jean McConville.

There have been a lot of books and movies about the Troubles, but I learned a lot from this book, and it was also a page turner, with mysteries being solved (to find out what happened to McConville, you'll have to read the book). The situation has always been a powder keg: "Northern Ireland was home to a million Protestants and half a million Catholics, and it was true that the Catholics faced extraordinary discrimination: often excluded from good jobs and housing, they were also denied the kind of political power that might enable them to better their conditions." A loyalist politician, Ian Paisley, made shockingly bigoted comments about Catholics.

Living in Belfast in the '70s was like living in a war zone. "Yet, in the midst of this carnage, the hardheaded citizens of Belfast simply adapted and got on with their lives. In a momentary lull in the shooting, a front door would tentatively crack open and a Belfast housewife in horn-rimmed glasses would stick her head out to make sure the coast was clear. Then she would emerge, erect in her raincoat, a kerchief over her curlers, and walk primly through the war zone to the shops."

Keefe describes the ups and downs of the peace process, the code of honor among the IRA (informers were harshly dealt with, and the Prices drove many of them to their doom), the hunger strikers, and the at times brutal reaction of the British military to citizens of Belfast. Later in the book, he outlines the project undertaken by Boston College, which had interviews conducted with IRA members that would not be revealed until after their deaths, but was challenged by a subpoena from law enforcement officials.

Say Nothing is not only a thriller, but captures the long-standing emotional battle of those who wanted to break free of British rule. Their is a lingering anger and sadness among many, and an incredible and senseless loss of life. As Keefe puts it, "In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalized in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals—and a whole society—make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect."