‘Say Nothing’ Forgoes Easy Heroes or Villains

The first chapter of Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 best seller, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, opens on a December evening in 1972, when masked intruders entered the West Belfast home of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widowed mother of 10. As they dragged her away into a van, she told one of her sons to watch his siblings until she returned. And then she never did.

Keefe unspools the circumstances surrounding McConville’s disappearance over the course of his nonfiction doorstopper. Her kidnapping—and eventual murder—was just one crime among many that occurred during what’s known as the Troubles: From the late ’60s to the Good Friday Agreement that brokered peace in 1998, Catholic republicans seeking Irish independence clashed with Protestant factions and British soldiers, leaving thousands dead across Northern Ireland. Based on his own interviews and those conducted for a Boston College oral-history project, Keefe paints a panoramic portrait of the era that reads more like a novel than a history lesson. He studies how a common, radical cause can yield intense bonds—and also lead to profound trauma.

FX’s excellent nine-episode adaptation, now streaming on Hulu, matches the book’s ambition. The show, also called Say Nothing, similarly begins with the kidnapping of McConville (played by Judith Roddy) and subsequently delves into an ensemble of key figures involved in the Troubles. (Keefe served as an executive producer, working closely with the writers and the creator, Joshua Zetumer, to ensure an authentic adaptation.) But whereas the book tells much of the story chronologically, the series often collapses time, primarily shifting between the 1970s and the 2000s. Doing so streamlines the conflict and its aftermath into a study of juxtapositions: between youthful passion and adult disillusionment, collective ideology and individual responsibility, the appeal of secrecy and the power of confession. Sometimes, the series argues, history yields no heroes or villains, just people whose convictions curdle into confusion, and whose wounds never fully heal.

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Dolours Price learned that firsthand. As a teenager during the early days of the Troubles, she joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary group that broke away from the original IRA. Its young members, Dolours included, believed in using violent tactics to counter discrimination against Catholics; they were regularly harassed by the British police, prevented from living in some neighborhoods, and denied certain jobs. Like its source material, which uses a photograph of her on its cover, the show is drawn to Dolours and follows her life story the closest, from her childhood to her death, in 2013. Teenage Dolours quickly developed a reputation among her peers as a mouthy, attractive militant who rejected the “woman’s work” of making tea that the Provisional IRA (a.k.a. “Provos”) leaders assigned her. Older Dolours seemed wary of her notoriety, refusing later chances to rejoin the fight. Instead, she became a source for the Belfast Project, Boston College’s oral history of the group’s activities, thereby implicating herself as a participant in some of the Provos’ most brutal crimes, including Jean’s murder.

The show makes clear that despite how much Dolours’s attitude changed over time, she remained the same person at her core. The younger and older versions of Dolours—played respectively by Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake, both magnetic and well cast—overlap throughout the adaptation, an elegant choice that helps hold the sprawling narrative together. The older Dolours’s reflections soundtrack scenes of her younger self at work; the younger Dolours’s eagerness runs counter to her older self’s evident pain. Dolours’s foundational goals take center stage as the story hopscotches across time: Although she was raised to believe in the cause of Irish independence, her biggest motivation was her love for her little sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe). In her youth, she stayed at home and joined the Provos in part because going to university instead would have meant their separation. In old age, she never gave up Marian’s activities as another, more trigger-happy Provo. The focus on Dolours is pivotal to the show’s success: She embodies the struggle to separate your life and identity from the larger conflict, even after it ends.

Dolours is also an effective point of contrast for Jean, allowing the show to explore the different ways these two women moved through the world. An early scene of Dolours’s induction into the IRA, after she’s argued successfully that she can do more than serve her male peers, is spliced together with shots of Jean and her 10 children moving into their own apartment for the first time. Both women are bucking expectations; both seek to protect their families. Yet Jean’s identity as a widowed single mother is, to the IRA, a sign of weakness, a possible reason for her to become an informant for the British; her neighbors also ostracize her for comforting a wounded British soldier who collapsed outside her home. Dolours weaponizes her femininity, flirting with a border-patrol officer to gain entry into Ireland during a mission, and her Provos superiors reward her for adopting the organization’s ruthlessness. Once she’s “promoted” to be the group’s Charon, ferrying the IRA’s perceived enemies to their executions, she must also shepherd some of her own friends to their death—a responsibility that weighs on her conscience. Neither woman can disentangle her quest for independence from the unrest around her.

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Say Nothing is not absent of possible antagonists—it treats Gerry Adams (Josh Finan in early scenes, Michael Colgan later on), the alleged former IRA member who later helped negotiate the peace accord in 1998 in part by turning his back on the organization, with both skepticism and sympathy. (A disclaimer at the end of every episode notes his ongoing denials of involvement in the IRA.) But the show is more interested in pointing out that the thoroughly human impulse to belong can also be shortsighted, even naive. The Provos’ extreme views allowed for a deep-seated sense of community, and these idealistic teens and 20-somethings approached their terrorist activities with starry-eyed enthusiasm: Dolours and Marian don costumes to rob a bank, giggling together after they accomplish the heist. The Provos grab beers and gossip about their crushes in between rigging car bombs. Even the older Dolours reflects upon some moments with a wistful nostalgia, underscoring the continued allure of a movement that had seemed so righteous and revolutionary.

The consequences of belonging to such communities endure too. In the pilot, one of Jean’s sons clings to her leg before the masked Provos take her away; later in the episode, Dolours does the same to a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, grasping his leg tightly after he fends off a Protestant man who beats her with a baton at a civil-rights march. Taken together, these shots illustrate how cyclical violence and despair can be: Dolours’s failed attempt at peaceful protest leads to her devotion to the Provos, and that leads only to more pain—for her and others. Say Nothing presents Jean’s and Dolours’s fates as intertwined from the start, even before it reveals Dolours’s role in Jean’s murder—an indication of just how intimate the Troubles really were.

In focusing so much on Dolours and the Provos, Say Nothing doesn’t adapt some of the most intriguing turns in Keefe’s account—the mass prison hunger strike in the 1980s, the Belfast Project’s struggle to preserve the anonymity of its interviewees—and fast-forwards through years of political upheaval. In their stead, the series offers a thoughtfully constructed study of the conflict’s moral complexity. Say Nothing demonstrates that war can easily bring groups of people together. Ending the fighting—reckoning with atrocities, confessing to misdeeds, and assigning blame—is the hard part.