The premature Life of Gerry Adams

ALTHOUGH he is 48 next week, and although he has led, to put it mildly, a full life, Gerry Adams is still a bit young to be writing his memoirs. For one thing, political autobiographies should be written when the hurly-burly's done. They should tell a story whose ending is known, reflect on something that has actually been achieved. The end of Gerry Adams's story is still unpredictable, and, until he moves the Republican movement definitively into democratic politics, he will not have achieved anything worthy of the self-presented accolade of autobiography.

For another thing, not only should Gerry Adams's autobiography not have been written, but it could not be written. Before the Dawn is not the story of his life. It covers only the period up to the aftermath of the 1981 hunger strikes, with a brief and rather uninformative epilogue on the "peace process". The things that most readers would like to know - how did he look in the mirror after Enniskillen or Teebane Cross? Why did he carry the coffin of the Shankill Road bombers - simply fall outside the frame.

Much more seriously, though, much of the picture inside the frame is deliberately obscure. In a preface he notes, somewhat coyly, that he is "necessarily constrained" by the "invariable rule that the participants in any conflict cannot tell the entire story until some time after that conflict is fully resolved". So why tell a part of the truth? Why write a book about yourself when you cannot answer the critical questions about your personal involvement in events that have shaped, and destroyed, so many lives?

The big question, of course, concerns the IRA. In an interview with Lynn Barber in last Sunday's Observer, Gerry Adams described David Beresford's riveting account of the 1981 hunger strikes, Ten Men Dead which he has been re-reading recently, as "the best book out of Ireland in the past twenty years". In that book, Gerry Adams is described as having been, at the time of his internment in Long Kesh in 1972, "battalion commander in the Belfast Brigade" of the Provisional IRA. Beresford also reports that, when he was interned again in 1973, Gerry Adams "was said to be Officer Commanding the Belfast Brigade". It is, on the face of it, extraordinary that someone who says he has was never been a member of the IRA, never fired a shot and never planted a bomb, should express such unqualified admiration for a book which repeats claims about him which, if they are untrue, amount to the grossest of calumnies.

If Before the Dawn merely ignored the IRA altogether it would be a deeply problematic exercise, but it does something much worse. When, in telling his story, Gerry Adams reaches the point where the Provisional IRA is formed and moves into aggressive action, he switches from fact to "fiction". Having told us that the nationalist community saw the IRA as "their army", he then tells us that "some years later" he wrote a short story that "tried to capture the harsh reality of the campaign waged by the IRA against Britain's armed forces as they patrolled the streets of my home town". The effect is a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction - "harsh reality" can only be captured in a net of inventions.

This story-within-an-autobiography is written entirely from the point of view of an IRA man going about the business of the cold-blooded killing of a soldier. (It is striking in itself that the IRA campaign on the streets of Belfast is not represented by bombs tearing civilians apart in restaurants, by children blown up on their way into the Falls Road baths or by "informers" having nail-studded clubs aimed at their flesh.) In its distanced, almost rapturous, style, the act itself is reduced to an abstract syllogism: "They should not be here, he reminded himself. It was his country, not theirs. They didn't belong. They were the enemy. They gave him no choice except to fight. And in fighting it was necessary to kill." End of story, end of soldier.

This is, though, only the most extreme example of a clash of styles that makes the book so odd. On the one hand, there are lyrical, often skilfully written, descriptions of the mundane - catching rats, getting married, singing songs in Long Kesh in which Gerry Adams seems to be trying to forget that he is a politician and to indulge in the pointless pleasure of putting one word after another. On the other, there is the insistent tug of polemic, dragging the prose down into the murk of tedium.

And the present inevitably casts a strange light on the past. When Gerry Adams remembers a speech at Bodenstown in 1967 by the then chief of staff of the IRA, Cathal Goulding, "attacking the physical force tradition", you sense a certain reticence in the writing. A few years ago, Goulding, leader of the Official faction, was a big hate figure for the Provisionals, and Adams might be expected to attack him. Instead, aware no doubt of certain echoes of his own situation, he merely remarks that "I was aware that Goulding was trying to move the situation on, and recognised that this was the responsibility of leadership".

Occasionally, the desire to describe and to remember does elude the demands of propaganda. It is remarkable, for instance that Adams admits that, growing up in Ballymurphy, he was barely conscious of sectarianism or of being oppressed. Ballymurphy, he notes, "was no better or no worse than any other poor working class area anywhere in the world", though he doesn't quite get round to acknowledging that Belfast's Protestant slums might count as parts of the world. It is worth knowing nevertheless, that, as is clear from the book, he did not become politicised because he considered himself oppressed but came to regard himself as oppressed after he became politicised.

For the rest, Before the Dawn is notable chiefly as a warning of the dangers of not having a misspent youth. While others kids were indulging in bad thoughts and Beatle boots, young Gerry was organising camping trips and dreaming about becoming a Christian Brother or playing hurling for Antrim. Quite how badly he was led astray by falling into good company must remain, until "the conflict is fully resolved", an open question. In that sense, Gerry Adams's job is to create the conditions in which he can write a real and fully truthful autobiography. If he ever manages to do so, such a book would be hard to put down.