Keenan, Brian 1950–

PERSONAL:

Born September 28, 1950, in Belfast, Northern Ireland; son of John Keenan (a telephone engineer) and Minnie Elizabeth (a weaver) Keenan; married Audrey Doyle (a physiotherapist), May 20, 1993; children: two sons. Education: Ulster University, B.A. (with honors), 1974, M.A., 1984; Queens University (Belfast), Ph.D., 1993.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Trinity College, Dublin 1, Ireland.

CAREER:

Orangefield Boys School, Belfast, Northern Ireland, teacher, 1975-77; Belfast City Council, Belfast, community development officer, 1977-84; American University, Beirut, Lebanon, instructor in English, 1985-86; Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, writer-in-residence, 1993—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named commander, Order of the British Empire; International Time-Life Nonfiction prize, and Ewart Biggs Award, both 1993; Irish Times Award, and Christopher Award, both 1994.

WRITINGS:

An Evil Cradling: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage (autobiography; also see below), Hutchinson (London, England), 1992, Viking (New York, NY), 1993.

(With John McCarthy) Between Extremes (nonfiction), Bantam (New York, NY), 1999.

Turlough (novel), Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2000.

Blind Flight (screenplay; adaptation of An Evil Cradling: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage), 2003.

Four Quarters of Light: A Journey through Alaska, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

In his book An Evil Cradling: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage, Brian Keenan writes of the fearful ordeal that catapulted him from obscurity into international headlines. A resident of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Keenan fled the ongoing civil strife there in 1985 for a change of scenery. He had accepted a teaching position in war-torn Lebanon at the American University in Beirut, but his academic year was interrupted when he was abducted by Islamic terrorists in April of 1986. Apparently looking for another Western citizen to add to a growing number of hostages, a group associated with the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad organization kidnapped Keenan, and he joined the infamous roster of English and American hostages held in the Middle East during the 1980s, including Church of England cleric Terry Waite and Associated Press bureau chief Terry Anderson. Keenan was released in August of 1990; An Evil Cradling, the chronicle of his harrowing experience, was published in England in 1992 and appeared the following year in the United States.

In the account of his captivity, Keenan attempts to describe the psychological trauma engendered by being blindfolded, beaten, starved, and confined to a filthy and minuscule cell for months on end. At a press conference shortly after his release, as quoted by Glenn Frankel in the Washington Post, Keenan discussed the connotations hidden behind the word hostage. "‘Hostage’ is crucifying aloneness," he said. "There's a silent screaming slide into the bowels of despair. ‘Hostage’ is a man hanging by his fingernails over the edge of chaos, and feeling his fingers slowly straightening."

An Evil Cradling recounts the elaborate mental games Keenan made up to keep his mind active and the ruses he and other captives invented to help relieve the stress of confinement. He narrates the occasional events of the long ordeal, such as the seventeen times that he was transferred to different holding locations throughout Lebanon and the daring but successful hunger strike he staged during the first months of captivity. Keenan also recounts the various relationships he developed both with other hostages and with the guards themselves. A good part of the book is devoted to his friendship with erstwhile cellmate John McCarthy, a British journalist, and the extreme sense of the absurd through which the two men began to see their world. This ironic detachment helped them to survive the darkest periods of depression during their captivity. Their detachment was also helped along by the sometimes bizarre behavior of their guards. Keenan describes the day one of his captors came into his cell to kindly offer him some peanuts, yet the man had disguised himself with an "ET" mask from the 1982 Hollywood film ET: The Extra-Ter-restrial. Another time, Keenan and other hostages were asked if they wished to convert to Islam, to which they held up their chains and replied, "No chance, pal."

Richard Beeston of the London Times deemed An Evil Cradling "a masterful chronicle of courage and resourcefulness." Beeston noted that published accounts of captivity are "a particularly difficult genre of narrative to master. But the wit and imagination which helped Keenan to survive his incarceration he also uses to bring alive his story." London Observer critic James Saynor remarked that the author "delivers some panoramic insights into human identity" in his account and thought Keenan's book "a story of mortification and self-mortification that's almost Scriptural in its resonances and its broad artistry, while being as gripping as an airport thriller."

Keenan once told CA: "As much as the five years confinement was a journey, the writing of the book was another journey into objective meaning. I promised myself when I sat down to write, ‘be brutally honest’ and ‘don't descend into voyeurism.’ The prophet Muhammad, in the Koran, advises his followers about hostage-taking: ‘Give them the Koran that they might take with them, when they leave, more than they possessed when they were first taken.’ Ironically, that's what happened, no thanks to Muhammad or his followers. Though they stripped me of everything … I found treasure … a meaning for freedom that no man, nor the imaginings of mankind can ever take from me … not in ten thousand times, ten thousand years."

Six years after the publication of his first book, Keenan worked with John McCarthy, a fellow hostage, on Between Extremes: A Journey beyond Imagination, which recounts their journey to Chile. As part of their desperate need to maintain their sanity during their four years in their Beirut prison cell, Keenan and McCarthy planned an imaginary trip to South America. They dreamed of moving there and raising yaks. Five years after being released, they realized at least part of their dream when they decided to visit the land that had sustained them. Between Extremes is the result of that journey.

The coauthors alternate narratives in this book, recounting the extreme changes in geography as they travel from Africa to Tierra del Fuego. Their writing voices, stated Margaret W. Norton in the Library Journal, are "filled with both humor and surprises." One of the more pleasant surprises for New Statesman reviewer John Hickman was not so much the details of their travels but rather "the appeal of their account" which "comprises the views of two people who understand each other so extraordinarily well."

Keenan has also authored Turlough, about a character who he would imagine visited him during his imprisonment. The character, Turlough O'Carolan, was a seventeenth-century Irish musician. Keenan claims these imaginary visits helped preserve his sanity while he was held all those long years in captivity. Turlough, who played the harp and traveled all over Ireland, was blind, and in Keenan's mind, the bard visited him in his prison cell. For Keenan, Turlough became, according to Suzie Mackenzie for the London Guardian, "a way of distancing himself from what was happening to him. He helped to keep him sane." In the book, Keenan visits Turlough at his deathbed and, as Mackenzie wrote, it is from this point that Keenan tells his story. Although there is much knowledge about the musician in terms of his art, little has been written about his emotions. This is the aspect of the Irish harpist's life that Keenan hoped to capture. "Turlough is reborn," wrote Mackenzie, "not as a musician, not as a historical character, but as a man." Although Turlough was a musician, the most prominent facet of his life that Keenan relates to is his blindness, according to John Morrish in London's Independent Sunday. Keenan himself spent many months blindfolded while he was a prisoner, and because of this experience, Keenan "is compelling on sightlessness, on the way it seems to foster the other senses and bring forward the inner life." The book has been widely praised.

Inspired by Jack London's Call of the Wild, Keenan took his wife and sons to northern Alaska in 2003 for an extended trip. His account of that summer, Four Quarters of Light: An Alaskan Journey, earned admiring reviews. Keenan describes learning to run a dog sled team, his encounters with indigenous tribes, and his viewing of the awe-inspiring northern lights. As Times Literary Supplement critic Catherine Humble observed, the book is "both an exploration of external landscapes and an internal journey of self-discovery." Acknowledging the romantic roots of Keenan's Arctic journey, Humble admired his refusal to poeticize his experience, noting that he "gains clarity through the darkness and learns … to ‘no longer be afraid of being afraid.’" Four Quarters of Light is distinguished from other travel memoirs, according to a writer for Kirkus Reviews, because of Keenan's "self-deprecating humor and eagerness to learn."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Keenan, Brian, An Evil Cradling: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage (autobiography), Hutchinson (London, England), 1992, Viking (New York, NY), 1993.

Keenan, Brian, with John McCarthy, Between Extremes (memoir), Bantam (New York, NY), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1993, Joe Collins, review of An Evil Cradling, pp. 121-22.

Daily Telegraph (London, England), October 7, 2000, Will Cohu, review of Turlough.

Financial Times, September 16, 2000, "A Genial Journey Dreamed Up in Hell," review of Between Extremes: A Journey beyond Imagination, p. 6.

Guardian (London, England), September 30, 2000, Suzie Mackenzie, "A Captive of History: In His Cell, Held Hostage in Beirut, Brian Keenan Had an Imaginary Companion," p. 36; November 11, 2000, Helen Falconer, "Terms of Imprisonment," review of Turlough, p. 12.

Independent Sunday (London, England), September 12, 1999, "How We Met: John McCarthy and Brian Keenan," p. 59; September 26, 1999, "The Place That Changed Me: Brian Keenan; The Former Hostage and Now Author Looks for Inner Peace on the Western Edge of Ireland," p. 10; October 1, 2000, John Morrish, "Stirring Historical Stew; An Ambitious First Novel Pays Tribute to an Irish Harpist," p. 65.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2006, review of Four Quarters of Light: An Alaskan Journey, p. 617.

Library Journal, March 15, 2002, Margaret W. Norton, review of Between Extremes, p. 99; July 1, 2006, Janet Clapp, review of Four Quarters of Light, p. 98.

Maclean's, November 29, 1993, Scott Steele, review of An Evil Cradling, pp. 44-45.

New Statesman, November 1, 1999, John Hickman, review of Between Extremes, p. 57.

New Yorker, November 15, 1993, Michael Massing, review of An Evil Cradling, pp. 118-126.

New York Times, August 31, 1990, "Tearful Ex-Irish [sic] Hostage Tells of Ordeal," p. A3; October 24, 1993, Eugene Kennedy, "Kidnapped in Beirut."

Observer (London, England), October 4, 1992, James Saynor, review of An Evil Cradling, p. 60; September 24, 2000, Eldon King, review of Between Extremes, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, August 30, 1993, review of An Evil Cradling, pp. 86-87.

Time, October 4, 1993, R.Z. Sheppard, review of An Evil Cradling, pp. 84-85.

Times (London, England), September 24, 1992, Richard Beeston, review of An Evil Cradling.

Times Literary Supplement, March 12, 1993, p. 24; November 11, 2005, Catherine Humble, review of Four Quarters of Light, p. 26.

Washington Post, August 31, 1990, Glenn Frankel, "Irish Ex-Hostage Describes 52 Months in Captors' Hands."