Some months ago, I was in Belfast on a Friday evening, wandering, killing the time for a few hours. I was passing a secondhand record store and noticed that its door was open. So I went up the stairs, and in. There were no customers flicking through the records, just a man and a woman, both in their early 40s, I thought, sitting on a step, surrounded by empty beer bottles. The man had a joint in his mouth. They stared up at me.
“Are you open?” I asked.
The man took the joint from his mouth and — eventually — said, “I forgot to shut the shop.”
I mention this episode, because it is impossible to imagine it occurring — the wandering, the door left open — in the Belfast I first visited in 1978 when I was 20, or the Belfast described in Patrick Radden Keefe's “Say Nothing,” which starts with the abduction of a woman called Jean McConville, a young widow and mother of 10 children, in 1972. Keefe homes in on McConville and other individuals and, while doing that, tells a good-sized chunk of the history of Northern Ireland, a place George Bernard Shaw called “an autonomous political lunatic asylum.” In particular, he writes about what became known as the Troubles, and the people who caused or were caught in the Troubles.
Read Full Article »
