Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Patrick Radden Keefe’s great achievement is to tell Northern Ireland’s 50 years of conflict through personal stories—a gripping and profoundly human explanation for a past that still denies and defines the future.
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.
... an outsider’s perspective is what gives Say Nothing its exacting and terrifying lucidity.
What happened to McConville and the quest to find out who was responsible makes Patrick Radden Keefe’s remarkable book a gripping piece of non-fiction. This is an achievement in itself, but Say Nothing — breathtaking in its scope and ambition — is much more than that. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Radden Keefe has produced a searing examination of the nature of truth in war and the toll taken by violence and deceit. The result is a lyrically written work that will take its place alongside the best of the books about the Troubles, among them Ten Men Dead by David Beresford, Rebel Hearts by Kevin Toolis and Killing Rage by Eamon Collins.
... Keefe has woven a fascinatingly true story out of seemingly disparate threads.
Keefe sifts through unreliable narrators and narratives from the IRA and the British Loyalist sides to present a fast-paced, gripping history that never leaves context behind.
... a fresh accounting of the moral balance sheet not just for those killed but for those who did the killing.
Keefe creates a persuasive account.
... two threads entwine as Keefe pieces together confessional testimonies of ex-combatants with his own prodigious reporting to put forth a credible theory about who was responsible for McConville’s disappearance and death.
... much of this masterly reportage empathetically evokes the militant republican world from which McConville’s killers came. Above all, it traces the relationships that emerged among leading republicans as the slums of Belfast slid into a many-sided war that debased everyone—relationships that soured after bombs gave way to politics in the 1990s.
... gripping, revelatory and unsettling.
[The book] reads at times like the annals of an action movie, teeming with superhero derring-do for 'the cause' — one Ireland, united, north and south.
... extraordinary.
An exceptional new book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe, explores [Ireland's] brittle [political] landscape to devastating effect. Mr. Keefe is a talented writer.
... vivid, sophisticated.
The sheer grisliness of the Northern Irish resistance made reading Say Nothing tough going.
... a riveting account of the bombings and assassinations carried out by the Irish Republican Army, as told by those who planted the bombs and pulled the triggers..
The book is an extensive and often wrenching view of this bloody patch of history, especially fascinating in the way Keefe shows how indoctrination worked at the family level. While he identifies it as narrative nonfiction, the writing here is more straight historical account, rather than an immersive exploration, but it will definitely draw those interested in the Irish 'Troubles.'.
As a historian, there's no mistaking his bias: Keefe is contemptuous of the British government and the security services, and he venerates the Provisional IRA. As the narrator of a whodunit, however, he 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’s juxtaposition – of Pearse’s romantic rhetoric and this hellish modern image, of myth and reality – is sharp and his intention clear. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland will be just that, true. But not clear and certainly not clean.
Deeply observed.
... Keefe makes a persuasive case that McConville was killed at his order for being an informer to the British—and the author’s dogged detective work enables him to plausibly name those who literally pulled the trigger. 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..