An Evil Cradling

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He talks about a letter he received recently from a woman whose daughter is dying of leukaemia. "There's far more heroism in that woman than there will ever be in me." Now, he says, he turns down offers to speak about his experience. "It's the past. Why would I want to do that?" He has always refused to go to America to lecture. "I am asked and I say, 'No.'" Money couldn't tempt him. "Money has always been the last thing on my mind. Though I don't have a lot of it. I have to work, my wife has to work." The poet is everywhere present in "An Evil Cradling," a beautifully and movingly written account of his four and half years as a hostage, which, perhaps more than any of the others, conveys the iron-hard reality of isolation. And so it began. His re-emergence into a world he thought he knew, the world he had left behind, but different now. Not so much because the world had changed, or even because he himself had changed. But because his place in the world had changed. He went into the cell Brian Keenan, an unknown university teacher from Belfast. He then became Brian Keenan, the disappeared. To your posts, now!” the captain thundered; a blast of heat shimmered through the air as it roared: “Else I will have you flayed for insubordination, you and your miserable company alike!”

Not to myself. To myself I never disappeared, I knew exactly where I was." Crucial, this. All the time that the world knew nothing of his existence, he hadn't ceased to exist, though he had transposed worlds. His reality, confined though it was, was his own. He didn't look outside. "My recollection is that if you focus on the real world, which isn't your real world, because your world is here in your head, then you are going to make life very difficult." A dissenting grumble rolled through the orcs, but slowly they shuffled off, and relief poured through Maedhros’ heart as he heard them depart. Yet setting towards him then he heard the heavy tread of the captain; unseen things crunched to the stones by his side, and swiftly he steeled himself, he drew to himself whatever shreds of lordliness he had left and thrust them out before him like a shield. Much as Turlough was able to reconcile his two worlds - Ireland the physical place with all its history, "which, though he couldn't see what was going on around him, he could sense", and his own inner life, through music - this book becomes Keenan's reconciliation, the means finally by which he can take control again of his own destiny. You could also say that it signals Ireland's destiny - which is not English control. "I do believe that this island should be one land." All of which makes it a bold book. Keenan is nervous, he says. "It hasn't gone out to the public yet. I think that maybe the people who have read my books before will find this a strange departure." But then this is, of course, its point. Fury swelled in Maedhros’ heart as he saw their lines break into a sprint, the outrage of betrayal squalled in his veins but tightly he gripped to it, he mastered it, and as Fëanor’s son revealed in the fey glory of his wrath he drew his sword, and aloud he cried: “Hold fast! Ortaerë, mehtarnya! Ortaerë!”Slay any left alive!” A thin voice barked behind him, and with its words and the roar of orcish glee that met them, blank despair crested in Maedhros’ heart as he was led away. “Leave the dead to rot.” His mother, a housewife, used to say to him: "Politics stops at your doorstep.""But I never knew if she meant coming in or going out." His father was a telephone engineer and before that he worked on the buses. A sweet man. "I remember him bringing home all these injured animals he'd find on the road and mum telling him to get them out."

One by one they were slain; the Noldor’s tight defensive knot frayed as the orcs gnawed at it, as the Valaraukar unravelled it; and Maedhros screamed out his hatred as he felt the rush of sundered fëar envelop him, and loathing bubbled in him that his friends might have been defiled so cruelly. For how dare the Moringotto think to cross him; viciously he decapitated the squat orc who leapt at him and sent its grotesque skull tumbling; how dare Morgoth renege upon his vows, how dare he lull the Noldor to their slaughter like some craven, honourless dog; and as the warm splatter of orcish ichor drenched him, a feral snarl ripped across Maedhros’ face. Brian Keenan publishes An Evil Cradling, an autobiographical account of more than four years as a hostage in Beirut. We were just friends for a long time, before it led to anything else," says Audrey. "All the same, some people thought I'd just emerged from nowhere and predicted it would never last."

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This is a difficult book to grade because the content attempts to mirror actual events that were not particularly compelling. I struggled reading this book because it was very interesting at times but then it became very dull. So I found myself pushing through the dull parts, hoping that it would become interesting again. It is an intriguing study of the emotions of human beings under such adverse circumstances and how, even in these most restricted conditions (for much of his time in captivity he was blindfolded and chained) we are able to experience a range of emotions, adapting to our circumstances and battling to survive.