Say Nothing

👍🏼Pick It: if U2's “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is the extent of your knowledge concerning Northern Ireland.
👎🏼Skip It: if thick ‘n' rich journalism bores you.

I initially picked Say Nothing thinking the story of the mysterious disappearance and murder of Jean McConville would coddle my true crime cravings. So by the end of Chapter 3, largely dedicating to staging the developing conflict, I felt duped...but hooked.

The Troubles?
The IRA?
The Stickies?
The What?
The Who?
Here was major period of history reading like a revelation! Never touched, mentioned nor acknowledged in any one social studies class.

Before Say Nothing, I largely type-casted History as regurgitated black-and-white events, contained in dusty books, inked to yellowing pages, shoved on forgotten shelves. This book refreshed the genre with a curiosity to learn about the world around me, over the wall, over the pond.

The magnitude of history is hardly digestible for a fifth grader during a five-month learning frame, so I don't fault my K-18 history teachers for skimming or omitting chunks of happenings. However, this book spoke to the need for writers like Keefe to revive the stories that go unsung.

Keefe's ability to give the in-depth, decades-spanning scoop on the Troubles is stunning. Because of his careful narration, I closed the book with conviction that history class is still in session and happening now.

So to be considered active participants in this world, we must pick up books like this one to develop empathy and to stay cognizant of the shifting landscapes and consequential evolutions of countries and cultures outside our own.

Definitely lived up to the hype! I had only the most superficial knowledge about the Troubles before starting this, so I learned a great deal and was compelled to pause and spend some time looking people and topics up and reading more about the history of this time. I particularly liked the through line of the McConville case as the lens through which this history was viewed. Radden Keefe explains his research and writing process at the end, which I appreciated, and did well in giving people nuance while explaining their horrific actions and choices. The audiobook was well done, hope he reads for more books in the future.

This book is not about the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, it is about Gerry Adams, Dolours and Marian Price, Brendan Hughes, and other big figures in the IRA and Provisional IRA. Pieces of Jean McConville's story, and that of her family, are dropped into the narrative at irregular intervals, disrupting the flow of both her story and the main story. I wish that Jean's story was separated out and made into its own book because I found it very compelling, and the story of the IRA/Provo bigwigs less so. I also didn't like how whenever a new person was introduced in the main story (IRA/Provo bigwigs story) we had to have the person's whole biography. It made for really jarring reading, taking me out of the flow of the story and into some pointless multi-page backstory, and then rushing me forward back into the flow with little more than the sense of “Ok, this guy is IRA/British secret service/other paramilitary”.

I like knowing more about Northern Ireland and the Troubles, but this book wasn't an enjoyable read.

Highly recommended. Keefe does a wonderful job of delivering an impartial account of The Troubles and the evolution of the “conflict” (as the English insist on labelling their occupation) through the stories of several key figures, notably Gerry Adams who really seems like a sociopath to me now that I understand the backstory and I get why my father disliked him..

I am of an age where The Troubles were a childhood background, where growing up agnostic a religious conflict appeared strange on not really comprehensible. When, later in life, i fell in love with [a:Adrian McKinty 12433 Adrian McKinty https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1584967497p2/12433.jpg] Sean Duffy series of novels set during troubles I immediately bookmarked this book to read when he recommended it.In today's polarized world I am in awe of how NI managed to actually step back from appalling levels of violence to actually give peace a chance. Adams does not come out of this book well but i cannot be impressed with how he managed to thread the needle to bring the Good Friday Agreement as an acceptable option to Northern Irish Republicans 20 years ago and that it still holds, albeit with many ongoing issues.This book is not about the GFA but is a history of the IRA but it is so well written (and from what I understand, researched) it gives the reader the basis to understand the magnitude of strife and thus the achievement of peace.

In Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, The Troubles are explored primarily through the lens of one disappearance: that of Jean McConville, widowed mother of ten. It opens with a startling scene: Jean at home in the evening, trying to relax a little after a full day of work, when masked figures turn up demanding entrance to the apartment. McConville's children try to resist them, but Jean is taken and goes with them. She never returns home. No one will say what's happened to her. We then go back, and forward, to examine how her abduction came to take place, and what became of all the players in the drama afterwards.

There's a lot of information in here: about the origins of the Irish Republican Army and the offshoots that came into being around the time of the fighting (like the Provisional IRA, the one you're probably thinking about when you think about the IRA), the leadership of that group, the eventual rise of Sinn Fein and end of active hostilities. But just as much, it's about people. Dolours Price and her sister Marian, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams from the IRA; and also Jean McConville and her family, how she might have drawn the attention of the IRA, the ways that the sudden and unexplained loss of their mother affected the children as they grew up.

I'll admit I struggled to get oriented in this book at first. I came in with very little background and a lot of the factual stuff, with often confusingly similarly named organizations and groups, is frontloaded. It was hard to get and stay engaged and I honestly found myself turning to Wikipedia quite a bit to get enough context for what I was reading to get my head around it. But once it finished with the set up and dug into the major figures tied up in the disappearing of Jean McConville, it found much more solid ground and got much more compelling. I was left with indelible impressions of Dolours, Brendan, and Gerry, figures who had been completely unknown to me beforehand.

The book prompted me to do a lot of thinking about the porousness of the line between terrorism and revolution, the astonishing power of pure conviction, and the potential of even violent people to turn over a new leaf and be a perfectly normal member of the community. That the members of the IRA thought of the violent methods through which they sought to achieve their aims as justified and that they were military rather than criminal in their killing of other people is obvious. Is this why people like Dolours were able to transition away from their former lives, because she didn't think of herself as a bad person? I always appreciate when a book is able to make me question my assumptions, and if you're interested in learning more about what happened during The Troubles, this book has a lot to offer. But do beware that the beginning is slow and may not provide enough information to really give the kind of context it's clearly looking to.

I wasn't as well-informed about the Irish Troubles as I should have been, as it always seemed so remote and intractable to me. So this book, which is one of the best-written non-fiction books I've read–fills in a lot of details, including the names of key players and information about milestones in the history of the conflict and its ultimate resolution. It's a fascinating piece of reporting.

Say Nothing starts out with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38 year old widow and mother of 10, who was dragged from her home in Belfast by a group of masked men and women in 1972 and never seen by her family again. But in order to tell the story of what happened to Jean McConville and her children, it's necessary to tell the story of the IRA, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the British Army in Belfast in the 20th century. So, after giving us the mystery of McConville's disappearance and the terrible plight of her children, Patrick Radden Keefe spends the bulk of the next 200 pages writing about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the individuals who played important roles in the Provisional IRA through the 1970's and all the way up to the Good Friday Accord. This was not what I expected, but it was riveting, so I happily went along for the ride. Of course, the story does make its way back to Jean McConville, and other people who were “disappeared” during the Troubles.

As an American who knew about the Troubles growing up and romanticized the IRA, especially as a teenager, I appreciated how Keefe acknowledges that there was a sort of glamour associated with IRA fighters. His book shows clearly, though, how very brutal and unglamorous the conflict was, and many of the people in it as well. The present is equally complex. There is peace, but survivors are traumatized, the past has not been fully dealt with, and as more than one person in the book says, the IRA has not gone away.

Say Nothing has 65 pages of notes, a bibliography, and index. It is well researched and reads like a great piece of longform journalism, which it is.

This is one of the most incredible nonfiction books I've read in a really long time. I could not stop talking to everyone about the things in this book. It's really remarkable meditation on the nature of radicalization and how people collectively deal with trauma and loss. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the Troubles of course, but also history and honestly just human nature!

A GREAT read and, with access to the hindsight of many of its subjects, a very morally complex work of non-fiction. I learned so much about a topic I thought I knew well, and I have not been this engaged by a non-fiction work in a long time. I am grateful to the author for his painstaking work in bringing this level of detail to the story, detail that illuminated individual experiences, emotions, and made visceral the life and death stakes of living through every moment of this historic, bloody period.

That said, and I want to insert a SPOILER alert here:


SPOILER
The book's final act, which is the story of a University archive forced to reveal its secrets and uncover information for law enforcement, is very anti-climactic given the stakes of the main story, but the revelations it makes accessible do help re-frame the book's narrative. From a storytelling point of view, I wish there had been another way to end the tale. Yes, I understand these are the historical circumstances that lead to the revelations that the book expertly sets up, but the story of a mismanaged set of privacy guarantees at a University archive is not on the same level of dramatic and historical interest as the revelations it uncovered, and while I do not have a suggestion as to how better to end the book, I do admit to being slightly dissatisfied by this final section. Still, history deals its own cards, so it is hard to argue too much with the choice.