“Say Nothing,” by Patrick Radden Keefe, tells the 30-plus year history of the Troubles of Northern Ireland through the interwoven true stories of people whose lives were shaped by the conflict, beginning with Jean McConville, a 38-year-old, widowed, mother of 10 who was disappeared by a gang of masked men and women in Belfast in December 1972.
Informed by the incredible trove of secret documents and interview transcripts on the topic housed at Boston College’s John J. Burns Library—ironically, the largest collection of Irish history in the world—the book sits comfortably in its status as a new classic on the subject. What it truly does best, though, is provide a thorough exploration of the roots and core issues of generational conflict, including how human beings navigate and survive tensions that came long before them and will last long after.
Tension, trauma, and memory weave around and through a parade of names and figures, each one passionate in their conviction, often willing to lay not only their own lives down for the cause, but the lives of those around them as well. While some of their names will be remembered—Jean McConville, Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands, and Dolours and Marian Price—more will be lost, their pain and radicalism barely registering on the timelines of history. The landscape, the infrastructure, and the streets of what is in truth a small island remembers, though. As the bogs themselves give up their secrets in the form of bodies of the lost, Keefe expertly drives home the point that even when the history is larger than a single human life, the “landscape (…) remembered everything that had happened in it and to it.”
With settings that range from Northern Ireland, England and the United States, “Say Nothing,” is a wonderful choice for readers who love in-depth history, anyone who proudly claims their Irish heritage, and those interested in “collective denial: the stories that communities tell themselves in order to cope with tragic or transgressive events. (…) 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.”
Learn more about this and other great reads at Rebel Heart Books in downtown Jacksonville.