"Say Nothing" Says Much About Tribal Warfare
On June 7th of this year, the masterful New Yorker staff writer and author Patrick Redden Keefe appeared on Dua Lipa’s “Section 95” podcast that features her monthly choice of a topical read. It may or may not come as a surprise that the same Albanian-English pop star we saw writhing in a cage to open this year’s Grammy telecast with her hit “Houdini” runs a thoughtful, comfortably highbrow podcast, and as they began the online video chat she at once strove to put the story of infamously kidnapped Belfast mother of 10 Jean McConnvile in an empathetic context.
Keefe’s book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” had come out to wide acclaim as a 2018 book of the year in a number of outlets, and the streaming drama of the same title had been lomng-awaited, but given the pandemic shutdown and a long development stretch, was only now due for airing. As Dua Lipa saw, the story is currently very much in the cultural moment as a nine-part limited series version produced by Fox that unspooled starting on November 14 on Hulu (and Disney+ overseas).
Most distressing, the host and Keefe quickly agreed, is how coldly McConville’s local community turned their backs on her. “It’s such a hard one,” Keefe said, “Because, in some ways, this is a story that is about tribes. It’s about the way in which, when there’s a violent conflict--and this happens in many, many parts of the world--there’s a sense of tribal allegiance, tribal solidarity. You’re in our group you’re in the other group, and that’s the way you see the world.”
The relevance of Keefe’s take is almost too obvious to point out, but the overarching point is that a great strength of the book and the thoroughly worthy filmed version is, after the kidnapping of McConville in thein the winter of 1972, as Dua Lipa puts it, “Nobody stepped in to help the children.” As Keefe responds, the devastating reality is “The community shunned them, turned their back on them.”
Keefe’s deep research, the product of five years of repeated sojourns to Ireland, broadens the scope of his account to tell the story of four generations—a storytelling decision that’s sagely and evocatively pursued by the series. Through that means, although the central kidnap and murder story are compelling in their own right, the scarring consequences are portrayed not just in regard to the victims but in the sad aftermath the perpetrators face. The story unfolds, with great attention to detail "in a land of password, wink and nod," against the dark tapestry of long-lived, low-level warfare—The Troubles--between the Catholic minority and the British government whose rule they rejected. Keefe makes no claim to piling up the entire history, and yet, “You slipped it into my pocket,” is how New York Times Book Review editor and podcaster Gilbert Cruz describes the fluidity of the story telling and scene-setting as we learn about Northern Ireland’s still-troubled history. (The Times dubbed the effort “One of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century.”)
Keefe’s seminal article on the tale was published in the New Yorker in 2015 as a “Letter from Belfast," sub-titled “Where the Bodies Are Buried.” In his own account posted as a bio on Dua Lipa’s site he notes, “In 2013 I was reading the New York Times and came across an obituary for the first woman to join the IRA as a frontline soldier — Dolours Price. I was fascinated by Dolours, and what her life could teach us about the romance and the costs of radical politics. Five years and seven trips to Northern Ireland later, I published “Say Nothing. “
For journalism, and with much credit to his several books (his “Empire of Pain” about the perfidy of the opioid-mongering Sackler family had its own important impact), Keefe is something of a national, or even international, treasure. He began his writing career later than most, having as an undergrad assisted the great (not to mention video-friendly) historian Simon Schama before graduation from Columbia in 1999. Emerging from academic stints with the law and economics, he found his métier. He was already a well-proven quantity when his first New Yorker account of the "Say Nothing" events ran; I felt I’d do potential readers a favor by simply stating on Twitter, fan boy style, that this lengthy Belfast piece was “some kind of classic.” Shortly thereafter came his reply comment, “Too kind.”
Hardly. Where those 16,000 or so words may sit in the journalism pantheon (whose crowning effort may be John Sack’s 56,000-word “Hiroshima” or perhaps a Truman Capote landmark four-part “In Cold Blood” New Yorker serial in 1965), is hardly where the story still reposes, given Keefe’s productivity on the topic since.
Keefe would not shrink from the notion that part of his mission is to entertain. Dua Lipa told him that for all the factual rigor of his research, his book “has the pace of a crime novel,” and his note to her audience reinforces that ethos: “Truman Capote, who first published his classic crime story In Cold Blood in The New Yorker, called it the ‘non-fiction novel’: a gripping narrative, with characters and rich themes and astonishing plot twists and all the ingredients of excellent fiction – except that it happens to be true.”
His motivations cut a little deeper than that: “If I’m being honest, the other thing that attracted me to this genre was the way in which it brought you face-to-face with human darkness.”
Humor finds a place in his work, and not a little of it comes in the oddly feminist story as sisters Delourus and Marian Price to undertake their early missions as IRA “volunteers”. One U.K. reviewer found a scene when the sisters raid a bank dressed as a nuns “could have come straight from Tarantino.” Series creator Joshua Zetumer (“Patriots Day”, 2016) gets the dark joke as he portrays “a funny version of feminism, where the glass ceiling is whether or not you’re allowed to shoot a gun at a policeman.”
Residual tensions and grim memories still abide in the mean streets (albeit with still-strict tribal territories sectioned apart by “peace walls,” meaning much of the series was shot in the period-friendly streets of Liverpool. In the actual episodes, I saw murals I’d glimpsed in 2015—where I made a point of diverting my son and wife to a kind of Keefe-homage city tour, riding in the noted tours conducted by conflict veterans, and getting a good look at the brutalist architecture of the Divis housing project from which McConnville was abducted.
That was a closer inspection of the relevant region than I’d had when doing a story for Rolling Stone on Neil Jordan’s 1996 shooting of the story of the legendary 20s rebel “Michael Colins.” Jordan could hardly have bettered his own 1992 “The Crying Game,” in which Belfast product Rea played the role for which he is perhaps most famous: Fergus, a decent and soulful man who happens to be a member of the I.R.A.
His perspective on the latter film, as he told me one wearying day of showing a historic British Army gunning-down of protestors, “Sadly, I’m good at violence.”
Jordan, RS, November 1996 (paywall):
Fred Schruers
Rea, in the crazy-guilt way such things happen in a confined community in a confined urban territory in a confined island nation, was Doloours Price’s inamorata for many years even as she sought to find a second act in her life.
In the late 60s-early 70s kick-off of real sectarian violence, we see when the sisters raid a bank dressed as a nuns in a scene, one reviewer wrote, “could have come straight from Tarantino.” Another scribe praised Lola Pettigrew, as the older highly attractive Price sister who’s more than willing to flirt, as being full of “devilish energy,” and she easily occupies center stage—whether as the young unit commander or,as she became, an aging alcoholic full of regrets. (She died in 2013 at age 61 from an overdose of prescription meds.). As Keefe told the LA Times: "We want you to be there with them, but then also to see the human wreckage of their decisions."
Taking on a host of creative challenges in the nine episodes that come in under 45 minutes each, and each episode handling a memorable incident, the series has been Hovering in the low teens of most-watched shows, with the added bragging rights to a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating from both critics and audiences. “As a portrait of young revolutionaries, Say Nothing crackles with the thrill and romance of committing one’s life to an armed cause,” wrote Nicholas Quah of Vulture, “There’s no way around it: watching Say Nothing provides a surreal through-the-looking-glass experience as conflicts between occupiers and the occupied — especially Israel’s ongoing assault of Gaza — continue to rage around the world, not to mention as the United States frifts into anotherTruman presidency that promises some degree of authoritarianism. “
His New York colleague Nick Jones, in a free-gliding essay on how Ireland and its stars and stories have taken over a swath of pop culture, is more explicit: For Northern Irish Catholics, who have their own cultural memory of armored cars and tanks and guns, the parallels are starker still.”
While skipping back and forth in deft editing strokes between several decades, the drama is framed by the Belfast Project, a series of off-the-record (supposedly until death) interviews conducted for Boston Collegebetween 2000 and 2006. “Say Nothing” shows us the key parts of two--with IRA Dolours (a riveting Lola Petticrew young; Maxine Peake older) and commander Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle young; Tom Vaughan-Lawlor older). Both those once-avid volunteers have grown bitter with time, mostly as regards their commandant (though to this day he refuses to acknowledge as much) Gerry Adams—who, Keefe writes, “perfected a dog-whistle style of political rhetoric.”
Despite an urge to fight off the dire memories by spilling stories, Dolours died without fully detailing the day she oversaw McConville’s killing at a remote beach. Sister Marian, long the truer zealot, figures in those moments. As Keefe told the Columbia alumni magazine, he was reviewing earlier-shelved research when “Suddenly I stumbled across a missing piece and could see, for the first time, the whole picture.
“On the one hand, it was a dark moment: I was very conscious that this isn’t just a fun murder mystery — it’s the story of a war crime. On the other hand, just in terms of sheer discovery, it was the most exhilarating moment of my life as a writer.”
We can only look forward to whatever’s next from Keefe. As he sums up: “I don’t have a beat, which I love. I’m a generalist, so I can write about anything.’ And what do his wide-ranging articles and books all have in common? ‘Secret worlds,’ he says simply.”
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