Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385521314
Summary
From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions
In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs.
They never saw her again.
Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it.
In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress—with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with.
The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.
From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past…
…Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1976
• Where—Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University; J.D., Yale University; M.Phil, Cambridge University; M.Sc., London School of Economics
• Awards—National Magazine Award–Feature Writing
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter.
His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and New York Review of Books, among others, and he is a frequent commentator on NPR, the BBC, and MSNBC.
Patrick received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Book Reviews
If it seems as if I'm reviewing a novel, it is because Say Nothing has lots of the qualities of good fiction, to the extent that I'm worried I'll give too much away, and I'll also forget that Jean McConville was a real person, as were—are—her children. And her abductors and killers. Keefe is a terrific storyteller.… He brings his characters to real life. The book is cleverly structured. We follow people—victim, perpetrator, back to victim—leave them, forget about them, rejoin them decades later. It can be read as a detective story.… What Keefe captures best, though, is the tragedy, the damage and waste, and the idea of moral injury.… Say Nothing is an excellent account of the Troubles.
Roddy Doyle - New York Times Book Review
An exceptional new book… [that] explores this brittle landscape [of Northern Ireland] to devastating effect… [and] fierce reporting.… The story of McConville's disappearance, its crushing effects on her children, the discovery of her remains in 2003, and the efforts of authorities to hold someone accountable for her murder occupy the bulk of Say Nothing. Along the way, Mr. Keefe navigates the flashpoints, figures and iconography of the Troubles: anti-Catholic discrimination, atrocities by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and occupation by the British Army, grisly IRA bombings in Belfast and London, the internment of Irish soldiers and the hunger strikes of Bobby Sands and others, the Falls Road and the Shankill Road, unionist paramilitaries, the "real" IRA and the “provisionals," counter-intelligence, the Armalite rile and the balaclava. It is a dizzying panorama, yet Mr. Keefe presents it with clarity.
Michael O'Donnell - Wall Street Journal
Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book Say Nothing investigates the mystery of a missing mother and reveals a still-raw violent past.… The book often reads like a novel, but as anyone familiar with his work for The New Yorker can attest, Keefe is an obsessive reporter and researcher, a master of narrative nonfiction.… An incredible story.
Rolling Stone
As the narrator of a whodunit.… [Keefe] excels, exposing the past, layer by layer, like the slow peel of a rotten onion, as he works to answer a question that the British government, the Northern Irish police and the McConville family has been seeking the answer to for nearly 50 years.… Keefe draws the characters in this drama finely and colorfully.… Say Nothing is a reminder of Northern Ireland's ongoing trauma. And with Brexit looming, it's a timely warning that it doesn't take much to open old wounds in Ireland, and make them fresh once more.
Paddy Hirsch - NPR
★ [Keefe] incorporates a real-life whodunit into a moving, accessible account of the violence that has afflicted Northern Ireland.… Tinged with immense sadness, this work never loses sight of the humanity of even those who committed horrible acts in support of what they believed in.
Publishers Weekly
★ Keefe blends… espionage, murder mystery, and political history into a single captivating narrative.… [He] turns a complicated and often dark subject into a riveting and informative page-turner that will engage readers of both true crime and popular history. —Timothy Berge, West Virginia Univ., Morgantown
Library Journal
Keefe’s reconstruction of events and the players involved is careful and assured.… A harrowing story of politically motivated crime that could not have been better told.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for SAY NOTHING ... then take off on your own:
1. A saying at the time of the Troubles went, “If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on." The times were certainly confusing: for those on the outside of the conflict, let alone those on the inside. Does Patrick Radden Okeefe clear up the confusion for his readers—for you? In what way has reading Say Nothing increased your understanding of Northern Ireland's decades-long (many say centuries-long) struggle?
2. Keefe has zeroed in on the murder of Jean McConville. Given the level of brutality and carnage that took place for so long, why might the author have used that particular episode as the opening of his book?
3. In what way would you describe (as some reviewers have) Say Nothing as a murder mystery?
4. Which individuals—in this book of real life people—do you feel more sympathy for than others? What about those individuals whose actions disturbed you? Despite all the carnage, are you able to find any humanity in those who committed acts of violence? Does it matter that they acted in service to a cause, one they believed in passionately?
5. Follow-up to Question 4: Dolours Price and others feel that the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement took away any justification for the bombings and abductions she had participated in. How would you answer her?
6. What is the significance of the book's title, "Say Nothing." What are the ways that phrase resonates throughout the book?
7. Since the peace accord, a "collective denial" has washed over the Belfast society. Is this obfuscation, a hiding of sorts, beneficial? Has it lead to a genuine, settled peace? Would an open reconciliation, through confession and forgiveness, work? What are the varying points of view, including yours?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)