I’m at a loss about the newly published Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.
As a reader, I find that, sometimes, books just hit me the wrong way. I think everyone who reads has this experience. When it occurs, I’m often not sure if I’m the problem or the book is the problem.
So, it might be that I’ve got a blind-spot here or just wasn’t in the mood to read Say Nothing. So, take what I write with a grain of salt.
On the plus side, this work by Keefe, a New Yorker staff writer, is a real page-turner. He knows how to pull the reader through his story, and I found that, even as I started to have qualms about Say Nothing, I kept ripping along as if this were almost a thriller.
My qualms
My qualms began maybe 100 pages into the 348 pages of text, and they had to do with questions about what kind of a story I was reading.
If you pay attention to the subtitle, this book is A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Its first chapter tells the story of the 1972 abduction of 38-year-old Jean McConville, a mother of ten children, from her family’s apartment in a Belfast public housing project. The perspective here is that of the children, ranging in age from six to mid-teens, who witnessed it.
OK, so, on the face of it, the account that Keefe seems to promise from that chapter and from his subtitle is one that will tell the “true story” and explain why McConville was kidnapped and by whom and what happened to her.
The mystery of the disappearance
Well — spoiler alert! spoiler alert! — the mystery of that disappearance is never fully explained.
Keefe does have on record the names of two of the three people who drove McConville to her execution and carried it out, and he makes what seems to be a good guess as to who the shooter was, of the three.
Huge questions, however, remain. Ostensibly, McConville was put to death for being an informant against the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Was she? By the end of the book, Keefe has to leave that question hanging.
Even more important, Keefe does everything he can to indicate that he thinks that Gerry Adams — an IRA leader who later became a successful politician while denying his earlier IRA leadership and membership — gave the order to have McConville killed.
That would be explosive stuff if Keefe could nail down proof.
But he can’t, and that’s another question he leaves hanging.
Disappeared
McConville is famous in Northern Ireland as one of about 20 people whom the Provos kidnapped, executed and buried in unmarked graves, leaving behind nagging questions for family and friends of what had happened to them.
These “disappeared” are a dark part of the fabric of the Troubles, the Northern Ireland conflict between violent Catholics and violent Protestants. In other countries around the world, however, the number of “disappeared” rose into the thousands, Keefe notes, such as in Chile where more than 3,000 were taken, killed and hidden in this way.
What’s odd is that it isn’t until two-thirds of the way through the book that Keefe mentions the “disappeared.” Up until then, he treats the McConville kidnapping as an individual violent event in the midst of a war with many violent events caused by both sides.
Indeed, by that point, despite the subtitle and the initial chapter, Keefe had precious little to say about McConville. As a reader, I was getting the feeling that he had chosen this very poignant scene of a mother being dragged away from her kids as a jarring and powerful way to start his book, but not as its central subject.
The central subject of the book
It isn’t until eight pages from the end that Keefe tells what the real subject is:
“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.”
Price and Hughes were key IRA fighters and were famous for their violent activities. Adams, it seems, was always behind the scenes in such murders and bombings but, according to Keefe, never took part in the violence.
By this point, I’d already gotten the impression that McConville wasn’t the focus of the story, and that her kidnapping was being used as an authorial pawn in beefing up the energy and snap of Keefe’s story.
Keefe’s story
That story focuses a great deal on the history of Price, in and out of the IRA, and of Hughes, because each gave statements to an oral history project out of Boston College in the U.S. on the understanding that their statements — like others taking part in the project to get the memories of those involved in the Troubles — would remain secret until after their deaths.
Well, that didn’t happen. Eventually, Northern Ireland police came to get copies of many of these statements in an effort to solve crimes, such as murder and kidnapping, that were still open after many decades. Keefe himself got a copy of at least one of these statements.
My problem
So here’s my problem: Keefe, it appears, is trying to tell the stories of Price, Hughes and Adams and the story of the Troubles (from the Catholic side of the violence), and use the McConville kidnapping as an illustration (as if there weren’t dozens of much more violent bombings and killings), and use the secret archive at Boston College as a news peg, and wrestle with a few of the moral questions that involvement in such a conflict entails, and attempt (unsuccessfully) to solve the mystery of McConville’s disappearance to bring home to roost a crime that, Keefe heavily suggests, Adams was guilty of, and write a page-turner that will sell as lot of books.
For me, it didn’t work. For others, maybe it does. More power to them.
For me, Say Nothing is an awkward conglomeration of a great many aspects of the story of the Troubles that failed to deal head-on with a society-wide war that touched and tainted the lives of a generation of Northern Irish.
The conflict, it seemed to me, got obscured behind the personal stories of Price, Hughes, Adams and, to a much lesser extent, McConville.
It seems a writer’s miscalculation.
Patrick T. Reardon
4.3.19
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.
Patrick, I appreciate your point but I think you are a bit too harsh on the author. Yes, the author (and probably the publisher) urged the McConville story as a way to gain reader interest. That does not bother me. Not nailing down proof of Gerry Adams’ complicity also does not bother me. As you well know it is not the reporter’s duty to prosecute a case but to do their best to present evidence. There is plenty of murkiness throughout this sordid story of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. All sides (British police, the IRA sympathizers, the Ian Paisley-ites et al) weave a complex story that most people only shrug their shoulders and give up trying to understand. In my view, Keefe did an admirable job in presenting the evidence he had — not nailing things down is secondary to the explanatory task in front of him. I don’t expect any journalist’s book to settle things once and for all. History and past events are always grist for the mill of re-visitation. This is an important story and I think Keefe is to be commended for his colossal research and effort. Prior to reading this book I had been following the Boston College project for awhile. I found it interesting that the commitment to protect the information was broken by the Irish journalist (Moloney?) who had had been working with the project and wrote a book to exploit this information. This is the guy who should be chastised. This book worked for me — I understand how it did not meet your expectations.
Mike — I re-posted this today because the other book group I’m in, a history book club, has read this and will zoom-meet tomorrow on it. I understand your points. They’re valid. I may be going too far, but the book struck me as false (as journalists can at times be). First, he turns the Troubles into a personality profile of these characters, a la New Yorker or People magazine. Here’s the “human face” of the civil war, but, to my mind, that’s bogus. His characters, particularly the IRA people, are portrayed as romantic heroes. I have a hard time with the idea of portraying terrorists as heroes when the terrorism goes on for so long to no purpose. Terrorism may be necessary in certain circumstances, but not if it just becomes a knee-jerk thing over decades. Second, he has nothing from the non-Catholic side. That, for me, made his book unbalanced. Third, he took all the “sexy” aspects of the story that he could find to push into a narrative that is well-told and highly readable….in part because he doesn’t grapple with the moral questions. Fourth, he uses his great skills as a writer to form a story that seems to hold together but doesn’t. Fifth, the Troubles were real. Many people died at the hands of the terrorists. We focus on the lives of these handful of people who got through it pretty OK while inflicting great harm. What about the people, like the kids of that woman, whose lives were screwed up or destroyed or ended? I think I could be misguided here. Still, I had the reaction to the book that I had, and I read it very closely, and, as a writer, I was able to spot the things that made me uncomfortable. Thanks for reading the review and responding. Pat
Pat, Terrific points, though I would quibble about romanticizing the terrorists. I saw the Price sisters as evil and Gerry Adams as exceedingly smarmy throughout. Yes, there was a lack of balance and I would have liked a bit more analysis of the British response. I am glad our club read this one. Hope your Zoom meeting with your history club goes well. Mike