"I think it was D.H Lawrence, speaking about the act of writing, who said that writers throw up their sickness in books."
Brian Keenan was a Northern Irish school teacher who came to Beruit, Lebanon to teach at it's prominent university in 1985. He certainly knew the dangers of working in country wrapped in political chaos, but he had no idea how much it would impact his own writings, teachings and relationships.
Keenan was captured and taken hostage by the Shi'ite the same year, and was passed about among several terrorist groups around Lebanon for five years before his safe release. In 1992 he wrote down his experiences in An Evil Cradling.
I was adamant to hate the book from first glance. I was assigned to read it for an English course at the time that Ken Bigley was captured and executed in Iraq. I was angry that the college would want to play on the sensationalist media ring around Bigley's death to encourage us to read about Keenan's hostage crisis, which occurred two decades ago. It didn't feel right for a 17 year old student to imagine themselves in Bigley's or Keenan's shoes like it was a museum of horrors.
Despite my intial misgivings I warmed to the book like I never thought I could. Keenan takes you right from the beginning of his life, he shows you he was no pompous self important Westerner poking about in another country's dealings. He grew up in a working class family in Belfast, he knew the terrors of living in a war strife country because he ws born in one. He was simply "jumping from one fire into another".
Keenan was captured on his way to work by a group of men with guns leapt out of an old Mercedes and bundled him into the back. Keenan spent his first few months of incarceration alone in a tiny cell with no explanation of his kidnapping. Chapters Into The Dark and Music are the most proflic within the book. As Keenan's rational mind begins to accept his situation, his semi conscious one takes flight. He begins to hallucinate and dream, he sinks himself into the microscopic world of his cell and is lulled into this new kind of reality. This explains the title of the book, An Evil Cradling, the familiarity and boundaries of an imprisoned man can make him fearful of ever leaving. In Music, Keenan listens to the rattling of the pipes and fans in his slapdash concrete hole and dances to an audial hallucination which seems to finally wake him from his adopted state.
The greatest introduction ever in the history of storytelling (and apparantly all true) is John McCarthy's first greeting to Keenan.
"Fuck me it's Ben Gunn." Gunn, being the wild straggly haired man in Robinson Crusoe who was forgotten by man, time, and readers of the book it seems.
It's more likely that you have heard of McCarthy, who was a 29 year old English television journalist when he was taken hostage. His position in the media and the furious release campaigns held by then girlfriend Jill Morell meant you couldn't read a newspaper or switch on the TV in England without hearing his name.
As the book progresses you learn more about Keenan and McCarthy's struggles. The beatings, the guards and their conflicted minds, the fear of never seeing the sunlight before they died. However terrible these things were, a love story begins to emerge. Despite Keenan's archetypal Irishness and resentment towards middle classers like McCarthy, their friendship evolves so much so that even a look or a insulting joke to one another would soothe the worst tortures the guards could offer. Keenan takes on a fatherly stance and urges the youthful McCarthy to have courage at the lowest points, and McCarthy checks Keenan's stubborness and aggressive stance when it could lead him into trouble.
The two men are moved into new cells around the country, sometimes joined by the American hostages and even Terry Waite, former spokesperson for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who despite travelling to Lebanon as an envoy became a hostage too. The interactions with the other imprisoned men shows just how Keenan and McCarthy's platonic relationship became an unconditional source of companionship which helped the men accept their situation.
These events happened almost three decades ago, and an Evil Cradling almost two, but it is still a relevant read. I am glad I never turned away from the book after all, because it has been the single most important piece of writing I have ever read. Keenan says he threw up his 'sickness' to write this memoir, to relive these awful events to act as a kind of therapy. He needed to do this to validate his experiences and to release them from his body and into a more universal consciousness. An Evil Cradling reveals the toxic existence of humanity, whether in lies in the East or Western world, but more importantly it shows companionship and unrelenting love are essential for human survival.
