To call a book “cinematic” has become cliché, but every so often, one comes along that you can so clearly see projected onto the screen, you are almost casting characters and setting up locations in your head while you’re reading. Patrick Raden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory is one example. When I read it for the first time, soon after it came out in 2018, I knew little of the so-called Troubles —the period of Irish history characterized by a guerilla war between the IRA and the British government that played out on the streets of Belfast—apart from what I mistily recalled from a college history class.
And yet I was transported to the churches and chip shops of Northern Ireland, the housing estates and smoky pubs. It is a remarkably brilliant and evocative book—narrative storytelling at its best. And so it was no surprise that FX planned to adapt the book for a series that is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+ .
The series tells parallel stories: On the one hand, there are the protagonists of Dolours and Marian Price, sisters who were raised by their republican nationalist parents. (Their aunt Bridie even lost her hands and eyes in an earlier bombing incident and floats ineptly through their house, not as an object of pity but of worthy sacrifice.) Upset at the mistreatment of their family and friends and frankly a bit bored by their lackluster prospects, the girls—and they are in their teens when the story begins—fall in with the IR.