Two women: Jean McConville, young, widowed, and mother of ten, abducted from her Belfast apartment in 1972 and never seen again; Dolours Price, young, charming (see terrorist chic, at left), and scion of Belfast's IRA 'royalty.' What is their connection? How does Dolours transition from a follower of MLK to a vicious enforcer? What about the IRA's assertions that everyone knew that McConville - an impoverished, depressed recluse - was a tout, or informer?
Keefe flushes out these exceedingly complex stories while providing a detailed and fascinating overview of the Troubles, focused primarily but not exclusively on Belfast. He makes it clear that the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to most of the physical violence but not the psychological misery. Intriguingly, in the aftermath of the Agreement, a project to record the oral histories of key participants in the war was begun, with the recordings secretly stashed in an archive at a library at Boston College. Secrets are hard to keep, though, and the presence of such tantalizing evidence predictably makes waves.
The experience of reading Say Nothing immediately after completing Burns' Milkman was a tremendous piece of readerly luck that I wholeheartedly recommend. Keefe and Burns are in agreement about the almost unbelievable level of paranoia that was part of everyday life; combined with the manifest ineptitude and viciousness of the various paramilitary groups on both sides, Republican and Loyalist, it must have been a hellish day-to-day existence. Keefe has completed terrific research and a first-rate narrative while avoiding sensationalism. Above all, each and every figure named, regardless of her crimes, is treated as fully human and deserving of empathy. No small feat.
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