Patrick Radden Keefe, _Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland_

IT MAY BE just coincidence that we've recently had two excellent books about the Troubles--Anna Burns's Milkman and this one--with Brexit looming and no telling what that will mean for relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Any revival of the old hostilities, both books make clear, would be a return trip to hell.

In his "Note on Sources," Keefe emphasizes that "this is not a history book but a work of narrative nonfiction." A work of history, he suggests, would provide more background about the conflict, (starting with Dermot and Dervorgilla?), or focus as much on the loyalist terror groups as on the IRA, or devote more space to politics. His book might well qualify as micro-history, though (e.g., Great Cat Massacre, Return of Martin Guerre): a close examination of a particular episode that opens up the sensibility of an era. Keefe has clearly logged historian-like amounts of archive time, for one thing. His sketches of the big picture are quick but skillful, and though he focuses on a particular event and just a handful of people, he makes the story seem emblematic.

The "nonfiction" label matters too, not just because "no dialogue or details have been invented or imagined," as he points out, but because this story would never pass muster as a novel. One of the main characters becomes in middle age a prominent national politician? Another marries a movie star? The man in charge of torturing and killing informers was himself a long-serving informer? No conscientious  novelist would permit him- or herself such naked contrivances. Yet, in this case, they all happen to be true.

The murder in the subtitle was that of Jean McConville, 38-year-old widowed mother of ten, who in late 1972 was abducted in front of her children by a masked IRA unit and never seen again. Her children, who suffer terribly from her loss, try to keep inquiry into her disappearance alive, but decades go by with no answers.

Alongside that story, we meet Dolours Price, a young IRA recruit who helps carry out the Bloody Friday bombings in London, Brendan Hughes, a legend within the Belfast IRA, and Gerry Adams, the man they both take orders from--also a man who ever after denied he was ever in the IRA. Price and Hughes are both imprisoned and both become hunger strikers. Once released, Price marries Stephen Rea (best known in the USA for his role in The Crying Game); Hughes, also released, becomes a lonely, haunted figure, not quite able to figure out what to do with himself. Adams becomes the leader of Sinn Fein and an M.P.

However, both Price and Hughes record their recollections for a Boston College oral history project on the Troubles. The recording are supposedly to be kept secret until after their deaths...but...well, you know how things can go. Do Price and Hughes turn out to have intimate acquaintance with what happened to Jean McConville? Do they implicate Gerry Adams?

The uncoiling of all that is the substance the final third of Keefe's book. It's an amazing story, just as a story, but it also brings home what Anna Burns wrote about in No Bones, and what is suggested by the word "memory" in the subtitle: trauma isn't over when the trauma ends. There is no leaving any of it behind.