‘Say Nothing’ — Part History, Part True Crime — Illuminates the Bitter Conflict in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe's book Say Nothing was reviewed by the New York Times.

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. It might seem odd, even offensive, to state it, but 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. There’s a nappy pin (a nappy is a diaper) at the start of the story, and at its end. When the pin reappeared, the novelist in me wanted to whoop but the reader wanted to weep. Because “Say Nothing” isn’t a novel, and that comfort — it’s only fiction — isn’t there. The nappy pin isn’t a novelist’s device; it was a real nappy pin, a small tool carried everywhere by Jean McConville, a mother.

Its closeness to the novel is a strength of “Say Nothing” and — I’m tempted to write — “also a weakness.” But actually, it’s not a weakness, and only rarely a distraction. Occasionally, Keefe lets rip with the similes. “Petrol bombs,” he writes, “broke open on their steel bonnets, blue flame spilling out like the contents of a cracked egg.” That’s asking too much of an egg. On the other hand, his description of Dolours Price, a member of the I.R.A., in jail, on a hunger strike, being force-fed through a thin length of rubber hose, is vivid and quite rightly shocking.