An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan
Excellent First Hand Account of Being a Hostage In Lebanon
After a shaky start this book not only tells the tale of Keenan's five years as a hostage in Lebanon but does so in a way that illuminates that experience and some of its causes.
Irish Passport Holder Snatched by Gunmen
Keenan's story can be summed up in one sentence: an Irish passport holder he was snatched by gunmen who went on to hold him hostage for five years. It was by anyone's reckoning a long, hard slog exclusive of the brutal treatment Keenan and the other hostages got from the guards. Not to mention the periodic bouts of Beirut Belly.
What redeems this book and indeed that period of his life is that whilst it is recorded it is not dwelt upon.
Nor does it become a cause for lifelong bitterness or hatred.
True some of it is pretty hard to stomach such as the periodic beatings and the need of the hostages not to show their suffering but the strength of this book, some would say the beauty is that Keenan shows the life-affirming side to this experience.
British Hostage From Very Different Background
In this he was helped by sharing a cell for a big chunk of the time he was imprisoned with the British hostage John McCarthy. The two men, from very different backgrounds are still best friends, something that started with that period of imprisonment and what Keenan traces here is not so much the mechanics of building a friendship but his own wonder at that process.
This though is a weakness of the book, although not too big a one: how interesting is imprisonment? How interesting is Brian Keenan the reader might be tempted to think? Some of his existential musings are just a little bit too much. And it must be said a bit too repetitive.
Yet this book is relevant, horribly so. Let that statement be clarified. No way is this book horrible, the odd sentence aside is a finely written account of a highly personal experience which has ruined the lives of many and Keenan shows how that fate did not befall him
Cottage Industry Kidnapping
Its horrible because kidnapping is still happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world. In some countries such as the Philippines its a cottage industry for criminal gangs and sometimes the police. In Colombia motivation is a nasty fusion of money and politics.
Rare Firsthand Account
So its relevant because here is a rare firsthand account of what its like to be the victim of such a crime.
Its not pretty. At least the Islamic fundamentalist/Lebanese version isn't. For five years he was kept under lock and key, often closely so, by guards who seemed to have little human sympathy for the hostages they were guarding. Beatings for the most tenuous of reasons, sometimes to the most vulnerable of people were given. Sometimes with rifle butts.
"The idiocy, I thought to myself, of beating this old man who is so filled with fear he can not control even his breathing," Keenan notes at one point recording the assault on another hostage before adding. "The rest of us sat mute, cringing to ourselves as we felt the blows that only he recieved."
No Cheap Heroics But The Humanity of His Captors
But the triumph of the book, and of Keenan himself, is not cheap heroics and not that there is a record of such and a well written one at that. Rather its that within this he held onto his own humanity and enriched it by this experience. He even can see the humanity of his captors. "These men existed in their own kind of prison, perhaps more confining than the one that held us,"
An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan. Published by Hutchison ISBN 009 175208 6
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