It was not just the poets and the fanatics; historians also conspired to shovel the murdered into the footnotes of history. By reaching into the footnotes and giving back to the dead all they had, their names and their lives, Myers changes everything, changes it utterly. For then it is not a terrible beauty which is born, it is a terrible indignation.
And he directs this not just at the IRA but to the killers of the UVF as well, and, which will be startling to those this side of the water, at the Parachute Regiment of the British Army which he saw in action and at close range. I have never read a book like this.
Kevin Myers could have done with a good editor to prune the odd paragraph, as in this description of Bernadette Devlin:
She was a a strangely attractive women [sic] and though plain-featured she exuded an incredible sexual energy and an extraordinary room-filling presence, which she reinforced with a wickedly witty tongue.
As the barmaid said to the young Dylan Thomas, ‘There’s words.’
But his version of events rings true, particularly in the terrifying details he throws in so casually: that bodies blown apart smell like dissected rabbits in school labs, that the Troubles lasted as long as they did because the killers on both sides had all the free time in the world, being on (British) state benefits. And what came of all these events in the end? Those who had directed them, and were left standing, got rich.
This is not a book the smiling men with pasts who now sit in Stormont would want to read, or the British and Irish governments, come to that. But the fact that Kevin Myers is still alive is the most hopeful single fact to come out of Northern Ireland.
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