Prison literature from John Mitchell’s Jail Journal to the prison diary of Bobby Sands has a revered place in Irish literature and the latest addition, though written from a cell in far-off Lebanon, is easily a match for the best.
I highly recommend An Evil Cradling, the story of Irish’s hostage Brian Keenan and his five-year struggle for survival in various Beirut hellholes. Keenan, a Northern Irish Protestant who carried an Irish passport, was abducted shortly after landing in Lebanon, where he was on a teaching assignment.
We have all seen the pale captives of Beirut — Keenan, the American Terry Anderson, the Englishmen Jobn McCarthy.
Terry Waite and the others. If you, like me, wondered how they retained their composure, and indeed their sanity, this book is the first insight into how they coped with their horrific experiences.
Not only did Keenan and others remain sane, they also seemed to add an extraordinary serenity and dignity to their lives upon release. Who could forget Keenan’s almost poetic press conference when at last he was freed, speaking of the lessons of his imprisonment, his love for his fellow captors and his renewed faith in mankind? Equally, Terry Anderson’s shining faith and extraordinary forbearance during his press conference shone through like a lighthouse beacon.
No mistake, their capture and imprisonment was a descent into hell where rabid fundamentalist gunmen made their lives torture. Keenan spent several years chained to John McCarthy in a small cell. They were poorly fed, untreated when ill and were never allowed to see their captors.
They were also savagely beaten over the most minor transgressions. But even in this Heart of Darkness, humanity flourished, a miraculous occurrence which ennobles not only the hostages, but also those of us who can now read about their experiences.
Much of Keenan’s book concerns the relationship with fellow hostage John McCarthy. with whom he lived in closer proximity than any husband and wife during the most part of their five years.
The upper-class English journalist, kidnapped while trying to find out Keenan’s whereabouts, and the Belfast working-class Protestant were an odd couple from the beginning, but it was their very differences which probably saved both their sanities.
McCarthy and Keenan discussed Irish history, British history, the conquest of Ireland from opposing views; they played Monopoly and other games with pieces of silver paper and a makeshift board, they wrote comedy sketches, spoke of their families, their fears, their impending deaths, and how they would handle their last moments. (Keenan said he would ask to see the sun one last time.)
When Keenan lay in a morbid depression McCarthy cursed him out of it, mocking his Irish sensibilities — when McCarthy seemed to be falling into the dark pit of madness Keenan pulled him back from the brink by reminding him of his family and those he loved.
They picked each other’s brains clean of every significant fact they had stored up in their 35-odd years of life, they feasted on the occasional book or magazine their captors would throw into them, they lost all contact with the outside world, yet created their own to preserve their sanity.
Outside their prison cell their captors, part of the radical “Party of God” group, toyed with them like wanton boys with flies, to use Shakespeare’s words.
The most horrific descriptions in the book concern the frequent moves from one jail to another, in coffin-like boxes, slammed to the floor of the trunk of a van, with exhaust fumes slowly poisoning them. Several times they were within moments of suffocation.
Then there were the beatings, all the more terrifying because of their random and irregular nature. Sometimes they were set off by nothing other than a guard aping a violent Hollywood film on television, other times by a particularly sadistic guard, some of whom also sexually abused them.
How they and all the hostages survived is a tribute to the indomitable nature of the human spirit and forms the centerpiece of this remarkable book, An Evil Cradling, which will shortly be available in the United States.
Buy it if you can.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November 1992 issue of Irish America. ♦
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