Patrick Radden Keefe won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction this spring for his book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, a well-deserved honor for what is easily one of the best narrative non-fiction books I’ve ever read. The future of the NBCC is in doubt after mass resignations over the behavior of board member Carlin Romano in the wake of the board’s attempt to draft a strong statement on structural racism in the publishing world, but with this, Everything Inside (Fiction) and The Queen (Biography), they picked three tremendous books for their three big awards in this cycle.
Say Nothing is the story of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed Protestant mother of eight, in Belfast in 1972, who was “disappeared” and whose body wasn’t even found for forty years. Keefe uses that as a framing device to provide an incredibly detailed, unsparing history of the Troubles, taking advantage of the trove of new information that has become available in the last decade on the conflict, including copious interviews with people actually involved in the violence who spoke to historians working at Boston College.
McConville was one of sixteen people who were considered Disappeared from the Troubles, and her case, and its ultimate resolution, work extremely well as a point of entry to discuss the conflict as a whole – particularly because some of the people involved in or with knowledge of her abduction were major figures in the Troubles. Keefe walks back to the origins of the strife between Catholics and Protestants in the six counties of Northern Ireland, focusing on the rise of the Irish Republican Army and its various splits (into the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA), and on the violent repression by the British authorities that created a war zone in Belfast for decades.
Keefe shifts the focus in the second chapter, after depicting McConville’s abduction, to Dolous and Marian Price, Catholic sisters who joined the Provisional IRA, the terrorist wing of the group that sought the unification of all of Ireland and expulsion of the British from Ulster at any cost. These two fanatical women were involved in numerous critical events of the Troubles, including the car bombing of the Old Bailey and other London sites in 1973, for which she went to prison; the first series of IRA hunger strikes in the 1970s; and several of the abductions of the Disappeared. Dolours eventually gave up her role in the violent struggle but remained politically active, opposing the Good Friday Agreement and eventually revealing that Gerry Adams was far more involved in IRA violence than he admitted, while Marian continued to engage in terrorist activity well into her 50s. The two make fascinating characters to study while conveniently bringing the narrative to several events critical in any retelling of the Troubles.
The Belfast Project provided Keefe with a wealth of material to fill in much of the historical record on the McConville case and many other Provisional IRA operations from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, thanks to hours of in-person interviews the two historians behind the project conducted with former and even still current IRA members. The original intent was for the content of those interviews to remain confidential until after each subject’s death, and after the first few passed away, including Brendan Hughes, who ran multiple terror attacks for the IRA against British soldiers and also led the 1978 “dirty protest” and the 1980 Hunger Strike while in the prison known as Long Kesh, and who opposed the peace accord as too favorable to the United Kingdom. Hughes named many names, including the person he said ordered the abduction and murder of McConville, and these revelations – coming after Hughes’ death – led to prosecutions and an international court proceeding that eventually forced Boston College and the Project to turn over all of their interviews relating to specific crimes, even those that involved confessions by still-living persons. Without those materials, Keefe wouldn’t have much to add to the history of the Troubles beyond what had already been written by 2010, but the interviews with Hughes and Dolours Price both shed substantial light on multiple attacks and murders, also allowing Keefe to provide a conclusion to the Jean McConville story (albeit one that never led to a conviction). There’s also a tangent here about the nature of oral histories and whether the Belfast Project might have deserved some legal protection, although the school declined to fight the subpoena and subsequent efforts to invoke journalists’ privilege failed.
The detail is what carries the day here for Say Nothing; even if you’ve read about the Troubles before, as I had for a project while in college, you probably haven’t read anything this specific and well-structured. Keefe weaves multiple narratives together, giving nuance to so many of the people involved, even those who participated in multiple murders and carried out vicious campaigns of terror against their own neighbors and fellow citizens. You won’t leave with sympathy for Hughes or the Price sisters, but you will still get to see them as three-dimensional actors, and their revelations help give more texture to the portrayals of other major IRA figures all the way up to Gerry Adams, who had a whole second act as a politician and supporter of peace while denying that he was ever involved in the IRA – a lie that he was able to perpetuate for more than two decades because of the very code of silence that kept Jean McConville’s killers from ever facing justice.
Next up: Tony Collins’ The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby.