Finished reading: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe.

Damn, what a book.

We follow a number of major characters in the Troubles of Northern Ireland from about 1968 to about 2016. I learned much more than I’ve ever known about this history.

The author vividly recounts individual stories so well that the book is basically an interleaved biography rather than a history. He explores anger and despair and confusion effectively. And the details are just amazing.

The only problem is that the book is only lightly structured, and there are so many characters that I was never sure where I was in the big picture of the book. There’s a framing device of a murder investigation, but that device only gets us half or two thirds through the book (with almost no signposts in between) and we lose all sense of scale and direction.

Maybe the book is a deliberate metaphor for the conflict in this way, because we also have the issue that the author goes to great pains to say that the IRA were terrorists and then makes the IRA main characters tremendously sympathetic, while doing nothing to justify the British/loyalist view.

Finally, the Irish accent of the voice actor is beautiful, if sometimes incomprehensible, and greatly heightened my enjoyment of the book.

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