The Troubles are over, and the majority mindset in Ireland has reverted to default position, which is that the North, currently, is boring and, historically, was too horrible for anybody to want to revisit.

In that context, an account of seven of the worst years of the conflict by a journalist most readily identified as a controversial columnist would not seem to hold particularly much promise as a pre-Christmas seller.

This book is the exception, the rule-breaker. One of the reasons is the writer's extraordinary capacity to relive, rather than simply recount, incidents he witnessed.

Myers gets as furious and as baffled, a quarter of a century after individual atrocities happened, as he was at the time:

"Gary Barlow, a young soldier from Lowtown in Lancashire, got separated from his foot patrol in the Lower Falls, which unknowingly returned to base without him. Alone, helpless, not knowing where he was, he burst into tears. He was grabbed by a crowd and disarmed. . . a soldier helplessly watched from a distant watchtower as a teenage girl appeared to orchestrate the semicircle that had surrounded and trapped the weeping soldier. There must be nearly a dozen grandmothers on the Falls Road today who can tell the rising generation of youngsters about their gallant contribution to the war for Irish freedom."

Somerset Maugham once observed that the job of a writer was to make old things new and new things familiar. Myers does both.

But he also highlights a horrific subtheme that has never been so startlingly evident in previous accounts of the Troubles: how children and adults with intellectual disabilities were disproportionately mauled, maimed and murdered throughout those years.

He may not always use the current politically correct terms to describe the individuals, but his accounts ache with real empathy. He tells the story of "a mentally retarded boy named David Walker" who boasted, untruthfully, that he had been responsible for a murder, in what he believed was the company of Protestant boys.

One of them, despite his Protestant name, was a Catholic member of the Official IRA, which abducted the boy and elicited a confession from him, despite his innocence of the crime.

"The IRA leader didn't kill young David himself, " Myers concludes.

"Instead, they arranged for yet another mentally retarded teenage boy to do the shooting. . . the boy did as he was ordered."

Most journalists and historians present during chaotic times seek to make retrospective sense of what they saw and of what happened.

Myers does the opposite. His memoir sets out the Troubles in the North as no more than "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

And . . . with surprising humility . . . he presents himself as the tale-telling idiot, the naif who blundered into horror, who for years woke, screaming, from nightmares, who belonged in no camp and who refused to see either side as anything but a primeval tribe, erasing the right to life of individuals in a mad chaotic brutality which dehumanised everybody involved.

He is fascinated by the uniqueness of the conflict, wondering at "the exonerative moral machinery that enabled the different tribes to do what they did" and at the irony that this was "the first war in history in which a single government paid and housed both sides".

The nature and sequence of the strife were, as he saw it, signally different from civil and tribal wars elsewhere:

"In other societies violence usually escalated in predictable steps: in Belfast, the final solution was often the first resort, and this existing culture of violence co-existed with and was reinforced by the intensifying political violence."

Again and again, he walks into the banality of the evil manifested on both sides, telling, for example, of an argument among paramilitaries about the feasibility of bombing two named pubs.

One of the men present announced that neither bombing was possible.

Another, named Jim Hanna, was unconvinced.

"The disagreement grew fierce, " Myers recalls. "Jim Hanna walked off, in apparent anger. He rejoined them later in the evening. He ordered a pint, took a mouthful, and announced that he'd done them both. Soon word had gone round the club, and people were cheering Jim and his heroics.

"'He did this to win an argument?

No-warning bombs on crowded pubs?' I asked, astonished. 'And people were cheering him because of this?'" Inevitably, Myers's own life, as a hard-drinking, hard-partying young journalist, is threaded through the book. In sometimes discomfiting ways.

In the interests of telling the whole truth, he needlessly sideswipes other named journalists and camera people, some of them dead. His stories of his hyperactive sex life fit somewhere between plumbing and car mechanics and make even the thought of coition surprisingly repellent.

That said, this memoir is nonetheless the best work Myers has ever produced, revealing something close to genius when it comes to putting the reader at the scene of the action, whether that's witnessing the agonizing death of an old friend . . . "surrounded by all the furnishings of a Protestant home: the lava lamp. . .

the three ducks, the portrait of the Blue Chinese Lady on the walls, the little beribboned brass bells and plaster cottages on the mantelpiece" . . . or hearing a pious teenager reprove the journalist for using bad language when the reader knows the teenager to be an unrepentant IRA killer.

Whereas other journalists turned their time in Ulster into a significant upward career move, Myers, in his own judgement, used it only as an entrance "into a dimensionless void, in which almost all energies that I expended vanished without purpose or consequence, as if floating aimlessly in outer space".

Out of that void has come a vivid, painful, frequently beautiful memoir, filled with a lot more than sound and fury.