Lola Petticrew as Dolours Price.

Rob Youngston/FX

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Rob Youngston/FX

Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Don’t say anythinga history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, is heavy in a number of ways. Subject matter aside, it is over 500 pages long, although a quarter of them are notes, a proportion that reflects both the depth of Keefe’s research and the breadth of the story.

The 2018 book begins with the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten children who was taken from her home by Irish Republican Army agents in 1972 and never seen alive again. It follows several historical figures through decades of The Troubles: Gerry Adams, a radical turned politician (who to this day insists 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 prison. Some died during 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 started working for the IRA as a teenager and eventually spent years in prison for a series of car bombings in London. And it’s Dolours who takes center stage in the new FX series, attempting to adapt this perhaps unadaptable book into a nine-episode scripted series.

Dolours, played as a young woman by Lola Petticrew and as an older one by Maxine Peake, is raised as a radical together with 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 begin with non-violent protest, they soon join those whose commitment to the cause of removing the British from Northern Ireland also includes the use of bombs. and guns. And this does not only apply to the use of force against British soldiers and police; it includes attacks on Catholics in Belfast believed to be traitors or informers. And eventually, as the series tells it, Dolours comes up with the idea to detonate 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 into a scripted series

As a show, Don’t say anything is well executed and delivers an excellent performance (Peake’s is perhaps the strongest). Still, the series can’t be expected to do the same job as the book; a scripted show is not a history lesson. There’s a patience and thoroughness to Keefe’s explanation of the underlying dynamics that led to the problems that the series can’t match. Decades (and more) of history cannot easily be summarized in a scene or an image. So what emerges more clearly are the things that Doing can be easily translated into dramatization.

Josh Finan as Gerry Adams.

Rob Youngston/FX

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Rob Youngston/FX

In the first episodes it was indeed the case Don’t say anything often feels like a caper movie, following Dolours and Marian and their compatriots on missions where they prove they can perform the same tasks young men they know they can do. Those missions turn grim when Dolour’s initially unsuspecting men – some of them people she knows well – begin driving them to the places where they will be murdered by their allies for their believed transgressions. Creator Josh Zetumer has said that one of the things he wanted to capture with the series is that radicalism can be romantic and exciting for young people, and Don’t say anything certainly does.

The trouble is that Dolours’ time as an agent, during which she still sees the conflict and her work for the IRA as quite simple, is the least emotionally rich part of the story. But they take up a lot of the on-screen real estate in these nine episodes. For example: Dolours and Marian’s harrowing hunger strike is one of nine episodes in the show. But it is one chapter out of thirty in the book.

When some things take up more space, others will necessarily take up less space. Until late in the series, there is limited focus on the McConvilles as they cope with her absence in the decades following their mother’s death. Apart from Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, there is little about other IRA members (or alleged members), most notably Bobby Sands, a major figure in the book who died during a hunger strike in prison.

Maxine Peake as older Dolours Price.

Rob Youngston/FX

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Rob Youngston/FX

Dealing with the past

The book is less about narrating actions than contextualizing choices and consequences, and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the series is at its best when it’s doing the same. The last two episodes, the most successful, focus on two stories. One of these is Dolours’ struggle, as an older woman, with her past actions (although she is still a strong supporter of her cause itself). Only when she is older, and when she feels that the revolution she hoped to be part of has largely failed, can Dolours come to terms with her own actions – including her role in the murder of Jean McConville. The show is not intended as a condemnation of Dolours’ radical youth, but merely a presentation of it as a choice made out of desperation with outcomes she could not fully foresee.

The other story concerns the pain of the McConville children, now adults, who long for the most peaceful repose they hope to find by properly burying their mother’s body. This is where the book’s thesis comes into its own: this conflict was devastating and unbearable, and for many people it never ended. People do terrible things in war, they take orders, they bond and don’t look back. But that doesn’t mean they’re no longer haunted, many years later. And the dual pursuits 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 main 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 interviewing people about The Troubles with the promise that nothing of what they said it would be revealed until they were dead. As both the book and the series tell, she did this to face her demons. She did it to share the truth.

But she also did it because she was bitterly angry with Gerry Adams – for claiming never to have been part of the IRA, for enriching himself through politics, for refusing to take his share of responsibility for anything and because, as she saw it, , because he capitulated to the British during the peace process that made him famous in a new and ‘respectable’ way.

By telling the story of this older Dolours, who is proud, stubborn and defiant, but also conflicted about her legacy, Don’t say anything is the most effective. Although it may fall short as a history of the conflict, as a biography of one woman it leaves a powerful impression.