The 'Say Nothing' TV adaptation isn't a history lesson – but it's haunting nonetheless

Patrick Radden Keefe's book Say Nothing, a history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, is heavy in a few ways. On top of its subject matter, it's more than 500 pages long — though a quarter of that is notes, a proportion that reflects both the depth of Keefe's research and the sprawl of the story.

The 2018 book begins with the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was taken from her home in 1972 by operatives of the Irish Republican Army and never seen alive again. It follows several historical figures through decades of The Troubles: Gerry Adams, a radical who became a politician (who insists to this day that he was never part of the IRA); Brendan Hughes, an IRA member nicknamed The Dark; and many participants in IRA operations, some of whom spent long periods in jail. Some died on hunger strikes.

But Keefe's most compelling character is the woman who appears with her face half-hidden on the book cover: Dolours Price, who began working with the IRA as a teenager, and who eventually spent years in jail for a series of car bombings in London. And it is Dolours who centers the new FX series that tries to wrestle this perhaps unadaptable book into a nine-episode scripted series.

Played as a young woman by Lola Petticrew and as an older one by Maxine Peake, Dolours is raised to be a radical alongside her sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe). Their aunt has already given her hands and eyes to the cause as a bomb-maker, and while the girls start out in nonviolent protest, they soon join the ranks of those whose commitment to the cause of removing the British from Northern Ireland includes using bombs and guns. And that doesn't extend only to the use of violence against British soldiers and police; it includes attacks on Belfast Catholics who are believed to be traitors or informants. And eventually, as the series tells it, Dolours comes up with the idea to set off the bombs in London that sent the sisters to prison. (According to the book, it was more complicated than that.)

The challenge of distilling history in a scripted series

As a show, Say Nothing is well-executed and features excellent performances (Peake's is perhaps the strongest). Yet the series can't be expected to do the same work as the book — a scripted show is not a history lesson. There is a patience and thoroughness to Keefe's explanation of the underlying dynamics that led to the Troubles that the series cannot match. Decades (and more) of history can't be easily condensed into a scene or an image. So what comes through more clearly are the things that do translate well to dramatization.

Indeed, in early episodes, Say Nothing often feels like a caper movie, following Dolours and Marian and their compatriots on missions where they prove they are up to the same jobs that young men they know can do. Those missions turn grim when Dolours begins to drive initially unsuspecting men — some of them people she knows well — to the places where they will be killed by their allies for their believed transgressions. Creator Josh Zetumer has said that one of the things he wanted the series to capture is that radicalism can be romantic and exciting for young people, and Say Nothing certainly does that.

The difficulty is that Dolours' time as an operative, when she still sees the conflict and her work for the IRA as quite simple, are the least emotionally rich part of the story. But they occupy a great deal of the on-screen real estate across these nine episodes.. For instance: Dolours and Marian's harrowing hunger strike is one episode out of nine in the show. But it's one chapter out of 30 in the book.

Necessarily, when some things take up more space, others will take up less. There is limited attention until late in the series to the McConvilles, who spent the decades after their mother's death dealing with her absence. Other than Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, there's little about other IRA members (or alleged members), particularly Bobby Sands, an important figure in the book who died while on a hunger strike in prison.

Reckoning with the past

The book is less about recounting actions than it is about contextualizing choices and consequences, and so perhaps it's unsurprising that the series is at its best when it does the same. The last two episodes, the most successful ones, are focused on two stories. One is Dolours' struggle, as an older woman, with her past actions (though she remains a staunch believer in her cause itself). It is only when she's older, and when she feels that the revolution she hoped to be part of has largely failed, that Dolours can reckon with her own actions – including her role in the murder of Jean McConville. The show is not meant to be a condemnation of Dolours' radical youth, but only a presentation of it as a choice made out of desperation with outcomes she could not fully anticipate.

The other story is about the agony of the McConville children, who are now adults, who long for the barest peace they hope to find in properly burying their mother's body. This is where the thesis of the book comes through best: This conflict was devastating and intolerable, and for many people, it never ended. People do awful things in war, they take orders, they commit and do not look back. But that doesn't mean that, many years later, they are not haunted. And the twin hauntings of Dolours Price and Helen McConville, who was 15 when her mother died, are the most tragic and piercing chapters of this story.

One of the primary reasons this series exists — and one of the reasons Keefe's book exists — is that Dolours chose to participate in a Boston College oral history project that interviewed people about The Troubles with the promise that nothing they said would be revealed until after they were dead. As both book and series tell it, she did this to face her demons. She did it to share the truth.

But she also did it because she was bitterly angry at Gerry Adams — for claiming never to have been part of the IRA, for enriching himself through politics, for refusing to accept his part of the responsibility for anything, and for, as she saw it, for capitulating to the British during the peace process that made him famous in a new and "respectable" way.

It is in telling the story of this older Dolours, who is proud, stubborn and defiant as well as conflicted about her legacy, where Say Nothing is most effective. While it may fall short as a history of the conflict, as a biography of one woman, it leaves a powerful impression.