‘All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’

– VIET THANH NGUYEN

This book did not have me hooked from the start.

I’ve always been unaware of “the conflict in the North of Ireland”, or, as the book points out, “Northern Ireland”; the difference between the two terms can be—and often is—politically vast, as is everything, for example to pronounce the letter “h” as “aitch” or “haitch”.

My family is partly from Yugoslavia. When that nation broke into smaller ones, and NATO tried to shell Serbia from the face of the planet, suddenly everybody I even remotely knew, whose surname contained “ic”, turned political. Mainly via their parents. And vinegar words turned into vitriol, which turned into hatred of a people, of a nation, of more nations. And all were against NATO/USA.

Radden Keefe is, I suppose, denounced by a lot of people just for writing about what’s happened.

I believe he is moralistic in the book. And I think he’s right in choosing sides, morally speaking. This could be because I agree with a lot of his decisions, even though he’s not steadfastly saying something’s right or wrong; he’s researched the hell out of this book and come to his own terms on a lot of things.

This book is, by the way, anything other than a Wikipedia search result. Radden Keefe has spoken with many persons and uncovered truths himself. More importantly, this book is not only extremely well written and respectful—as far as that is possible, considering that some stances are held—but stylistically beautiful. The rhythms this book contains is staggeringly wondrous and radiant: it’s like truly discovering what is beautiful in jazz. The timings, the space of the book, despite the thousands of subjectively dormant facts that have been uncovered in these pages, are, simply put, a reminder of what documentary writing can be at its best.

This book delves into the Troubles from different perspectives, naturally from different political ones, but also from the eyes of everyday people who lived in the Troubles.

The story of Jean McConville and her family horrified me on several different levels. From the book:

Nights were especially eerie in Divis. People would turn out all their lights, so the whole vast edifice was swathed in darkness. To the McConville children, one night in particular would forever stand out. Jean had recently returned from the hospital, and there was a protracted gun battle outside the door. Then the shooting stopped and they heard a voice. ‘Help me!’ It was a man’s voice. Not local. ‘Please, God, I don’t want to die.’ It was a soldier. A British soldier. ‘Help me!’ he cried.

As her children watched, Jean McConville rose from the floor, where they had been cowering, and moved to the door. Peeking outside, she saw the soldier. He was wounded, lying in the gallery out in front. The children remember her re-entering the flat and retrieving a pillow, which she brought to the soldier. Then she comforted him, murmuring a prayer and cradling his head, before eventually creeping back into the flat.

Archie – who, with Robert in prison, was the oldest child there – admonished his mother for intervening. ‘You’re only asking for trouble,’ he said. ‘That was somebody’s son,’ she replied. The McConvilles never saw the soldier again, and to this day the children cannot say what became of him.

But when they left the flat the next morning, they found fresh graffiti daubed across their door: BRIT LOVER.

I feel that the author never tries to say that this book is an ultimate truth of sorts; the title gives that away. Radden Keefe is a great storyteller and an adept journalist.

I’ll never understand the Troubles as somebody who’s lived at that time and in Northern Ireland will. A book will never provide me with even a day’s worth of anything remotely akin to that.

What this book does provide, is written transcript of the lives and deaths of innocent people, the search for justice, and the search for truth. In the middle of this book, the search for truth prevails over all the deaths, those committed by the British, the IRA, Gerry Adams‘s many different lives, the clandestine testimonies by Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, the graffitied murals of Belfast, past the funerals, the Armalites, the graves, and the searches for graves, decades past.

The past might never come to rest, but when do we?

We learn that silence buries truth.