SAY NOTHING by Patrick Radden Keefe

Before reading this book, I really knew very little about the decades-long violence in Northern Ireland.  I would characterize it as a long-running civil war between the majority Protestants who want to maintain British rule and the minority Catholics who want to de-couple from the Brits and reunify with the Republic of Ireland, whose population is mostly Catholic.  The bigotry against the Catholics that the author describes is astonishing and explains why the situation became so volatile, basically igniting another war fought over religious differences.  The author focuses primarily on two women—Jean McConville and Dolours Price.  Jean was a Protestant mother of ten whose deceased husband was Catholic.  The IRA abducted her in 1972, and she just disappeared.  Dolours Price and her sister, Marian, were IRA members who participated in the London car bombings in 1973.  These women’s stories are closely intertwined with that of Gerry Adams, an IRA member turned politician, who helped orchestrate a ceasefire in 1994 and a peace agreement in 1998.  The frustration of the IRA with the fact that so many people died for their cause without accomplishing anything dovetails with what’s happened in Afghanistan and previously in Vietnam, where all the bloodshed seems to have been all for naught.  The author sticks to a more or less sequential history here, which means that he has to juggle the lives of multiple characters simultaneously.  Since most of these names were unfamiliar to me, I had some difficulty keeping track of who was who, and my attention waned from time to time.  One character whose name I did know was Stephen Rea, who starred in the excellent movie The Crying Game, in which he played a conflicted IRA member.  I found it fascinating that he was married to Dolours Price, after she spent years in jail, and fathered two sons with her.  Two big questions remain pretty much unanswered:  Was Dolours Price remorseful, and why was Jean McConville abducted?  Then, of course, the overarching unanswered question about the conflict is, “What was the point?”