Leslie Jarvis taught leatherwork in Magilligan prison and was therefore a legitimate target. He was shot in the head by the IRA as he sat in his Skoda outside the college where he was attending night classes. Before they walked casually away, the killers booby-trapped the car, so that his body, instead of being honoured and tended, became the lure that drew two policemen to their deaths. The body of Laurence Marley, an IRA man shot dead by the UVF, lay unburied for days because of a battle of wills between the IRA and the RUC over arrangements for the funeral. Even when he was finally being taken to Milltown Cemetery, more rows erupted. At one point the coffin was left down on the road as policemen and republicans argued over paramilitary displays.
The body of John McNulty, an Antrim man having a night on the town in Belfast, was mutilated by his loyalist killers, part of one ear being cut off and crossed tricolours carved into his arm. The 16 year-old body of James Morgan, having been beaten lifeless by loyalists, was burned and dumped in a pit used to dispose of dead farm animals. The mother of 12-year-old James Barker, a victim of the Real IRA in Omagh, had to identify his body "with half of his head gone and those beautiful green eyes looking out at me as if he was waiting for me". Some days after a bus-driver Robert Gibson and eight other people were blown apart by the Provisional IRA on Bloody Friday in 1972, the police found vertebrae and a ribcage on the roof of a building, spotted only because the seagulls were diving on the bones.
The horror of 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland lies not only in the savage assault on vulnerable human flesh but also in the frequent impossibility of decent mourning. The immemorial instinct to cradle and cosset the lifeless bodies of loved ones has often been denied by the sheer ferocity of the violence. For the killers, it was sometimes not enough merely to ensure that their victims were annihilated. They needed to know, too, that their very physical remains were disintegrated or scattered, mutilated or hidden away without ritual or consolation.
Nothing can undo those obscene acts and we live, whether we know it or not, in their unquiet aftermath. No words or books, no statues or memorials can restore what has been stolen or reassemble what has been shattered. All we can do is remember. And the scrupulous, austere secular litany that is Lost Lives is the greatest act of remembrance that has yet emerged. In its quiet, sober way, it sets the civility of memory against the barbarism of oblivion.
One of the most difficult and yet most crucial problems in contemporary culture and in the resolution of conflicts is that of dealing with the memory of suffering and injustice. Must a culture keep alive the memory of past wrongs? Or should it, in the name of a peaceful future, urge forgetfulness? How can the victims of conflict be honoured and memorialised without implicitly demanding vengeance? We are, rightly, haunted by images of historical obliteration like that of the children on their way to a concentration camp in a cattle truck who were so hungry that they ate the cardboard identification tags hung round their necks and so did not even survive as names. The death of one's name increases the awfulness of death itself.
But we should also be haunted by images like Jonathan Swift's Struldbruggs in Gulliver's Travels, who live forever but who, because "they have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age" have become "incapable of friendship and dead to all natural affection". Historical oblivion is terrible, but so is the kind of selective remembering that makes people incapable of friendship in the present. The burden of steering a course between the children who ate their names on the one hand and the Struldbruggs on the other has been taken on selflessly by the journalists David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters and Brian Feeney and the American researcher Chris Thornton in a book collectively dedicated to their children that they might learn from the lessons of the past. Their map through the moral maze is deceptively simple: the names of all the dead with a description of who they were and how they died.
This may not, on the face of it, seem like a great achievement. But there has been no single authoritative account of the victims of violence, from the young Catholics murdered by the UVF in 1966 to Charles Bennett, whose body was used by the IRA in July of this year as a reminder of their continuing existence. A list published by the RUC in 1995, for example, left out some victims, misspelled some of their names, used its criteria for selection inconsistently, and was marked by spectacular exclusions like Bobby Sands and the other republican hunger strikers.
Merely as a formidable exercise in research, then, Lost Lives is immensely valuable. But it is much more than that. Two things raise it to a dignity and significance far beyond the parameters of an academic audit of horror. One is that it includes all the dead, reminding us that the single salient fact of the conflict is death itself. The other is that it restores, with its economical but vivid detail, the humanity behind the statistics.
To know, for example, that the prison officer John Cummings was watching Morecambe and Wise when the bell went and was still laughing when he opened the door to his murderers is to enter momentarily into the life that was stolen. To think that the father of Alan Radford, a young boy killed in the Omagh massacre, had, as a soldier, survived an IRA attack years before, is to have the awful longevity of the conflict brought home with an utterable force.
The care and tact of this book remind you, as it lingers in the mind, of the courage and solicitude of a woman washing the body of her dead husband, giving grief its due by touching the inadequate remains of a life that was loved. It is a volume that should weigh for decades, not just on the shelves of every home in the country, but on the minds of every citizen.
Fintan O'Toole is a critic and biographer and an Irish Times journalist
