Life During Wartime

On Ian Cobain's "Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island"

Francois Truffaut once said that there’s “no such thing as an anti-war movie,” as the cinematic form inherently valorizes its combatants, and we might extend the sentiment to the broader genre of “true-crime”, which knowingly or unknowingly valorizes the criminals. On the low end, you see it in the lurid fascination with the lives of serial killers (why’d Ted Bundy have to get yassified?) and the terror-porn explosion of the genre on streaming platforms and podcasts; on the high-end, you get books of history that are lauded for ‘reading like a thriller.’ Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood practically invented the genre, and people then and now have issues with Capote’s interest in the murderers; despite the genre becoming truer since Capote’s more… shall we say… fast-and-loose version, the affinity for the criminal as subject remains. Murder is horrible, yes, but it keeps the pages turning; you can imagine reader and author alike shaking their head while continuing to revel in every detail of how the gory deals go down. Ian Cobain’s 2020 book Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island is a twin to Patrick Radden Keefe’s more famous¹ 2018 book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Island; they both use a single Irish Republican Army (IRA) killing as the frame for a wider cultural history of Ireland during the Troubles. Say Nothing goes a bit wider in its focus, giving a broad history of the IRA as an organization and Ireland’s path towards the Good Friday agreement, whereas Anatomy of a Killing almost hews to military history in its narrow focus on a single IRA unit and their target. Both run up on the same touchstone of the genre, however: no matter how much they might try to wag their authorial fingers and keep things ‘evenhanded’, the books are still in thrall to their putative criminals. A reader comes out of the books knowing quite well that the IRA killed innocent people, sure, but also that the organization was full of deeply committed political activists fighting for a cause that almost cannot be seen as anything else but righteous given the well-documented and extensively retold incidents of colonial oppression. I don’t believe it’s necessarily what Radden Keefe and Cobain planned as they wrote their books, but the logic of the genre eventually rules over all. Like Junior Murvin once sang, police and thieves in the street – oh yeah!!!

Where Radden Keefe’s book telescopes out from the murder of Jean McConville to tell a broad history of the Troubles, Cobain’s book drills down deep on just one IRA unit and the planning and execution of a hit on a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) policeman, Millar McAllister, at his home in Lisburn, a deeply Protestant suburb outside of Belfast. We’re given the backstories of all the principal actors, inciting incidents in their lives that led them to join the IRA or RUC, a couple of preceding setup anecdotes in the months preceding the hit, and some hyperlocal Lisburn history to add some more depth, but the meat of Anatomy of a Killing is just that: a blow-by-blow account of how the hit went down, with nearly as much attention after that to how the assailants were tracked down, arrested, and tried. In Say Nothing, the murder is a sort of symbol for a general senselessness in the period, a emblem of collateral damage in a deeply wounding time; in Anatomy of a Killing, the murder is just one act in a long war, and Cobain dives into the historical record to get the movements of the troops down to the minute.