Say Nothing

Reading the new history of the IRA, I thought of a passage from Calvin Trillin's "Killings." In "Killings," two neighbors become involved in an endless feud. It's a feud about a very tiny piece of land. The feud ends with one neighbor shooting and murdering the other neighbor. As someone else in the town said, "Both parties were wrong. Everything could have ended if someone had said, I was wrong and I'm sorry."

The byzantine struggles between the Irish and the English are so complex and so tricky to follow. The English were brutal. Relentlessly brutal. The IRA responded by becoming brutal. Relentlessly brutal. The stink of evil is on both parties. An iconic photo from the era of the Troubles seems to suggest how awful and how infectious the evil was: A priest kneels by the corpse of a murdered Irishman, and the man's blood is now on the priest's lips, like a ghoulish kind of lipstick, because the priest has attempted (and failed at) resuscitation.

One critic compared "Say Nothing" to Dostoyevsky, and it's easy to see why. The idea is that *everyone is implicated in evil* ....In other words, no one in "Say Nothing" manages to stay out of a kind of moral gray area. The characters are fascinating: terrorist Dolours Price, Price's Oscar-nominated husband, Stephen Rea, oily, Machiavellian puppet-master Gerry Adams, and a widowed mother of ten who is abducted and "disappeared" before her fortieth birthday. Your jaw drops before the end of almost every paragraph; I'm not using hyperbole (well, maybe a little bit).

Some have argued that Gerry Adams's awful violence helped to "launch a ship" -- that the peace existing today would not have been possible without the murders, the bombings, the hunger strikes, the bodies dumped in unmarked graves. But, in a final bit of irony (there is so much irony in this book), the author wonders if Irish separation from England might have been possible in a fully peaceful way--via Brexit, of all phenomena! (The Republic of Ireland will stay a part of Europe. Since Northern Ireland feels increasingly linked to the Republic of Ireland, the Northern Irish might not want to stay attached to their wacky Brexit-loving neighbors in England; Northern Ireland might just become a part of European *Ireland* -- unequivocally -- once and for all. Bizarre and fascinating.)

People gush and gush about certain books, and sometimes the hype isn't earned. "Say Nothing" earns its hype. It's a book that haunts me. It can slightly alter the way that you look at the world. It's brutal and disturbing--and also wondrous, in the sense that it alerts you to varieties of human behavior you might not have contemplated before. It's capable of changing lives. Believe what you are hearing in the news. Buy the book.