Laughter in the Dark (An Evil Cradling - Brian Keenan)

Member Name: frannyfortune

Product:	An Evil Cradling - Brian Keenan
Date:	31/07/01 (1750 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: don't know what to say other than see below

Disadvantages: this op is a bit long

This is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read – made all the more striking by the fact that every word of it is true. In 1985, a teacher from Belfast named Brian Keenan was bundled into a car as he left for work one morning. Belfast is a notoriously troubled place; but this wasn’t Ireland, this was Beirut, and Keenan had been taken hostage by the Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist Shi’ite group. He remained their captive for the next four and a half years. During that time he had no contact with the outside world, and often saw no-one other than his kidnappers. On release, both he and fellow hostage John McCarthy wrote about their imprisonment. This is Brian Keenan’s story.

I often shy away from books like this – I know it’s the sort of thing one should know about, maybe even force oneself to read, but I’m a bit of a wimp when all is said and done, and don’t always want to look the dark side of humanity straight in the eye. I was scared that the hostages’ experiences would disturb me – haunt me – be unbearable. However, something drew me to this book, maybe the cover (an illustration of a naked man, sitting in the dark, resting his head on his knees and shielding his face with his arms), or the title, and I felt I had to read it. It did disturb me. It does haunt me. It isn’t unbearable, however; in fact the book as a whole is actually uplifting. Does that sound strange? Or corny? I can’t help using that word, though. Uplifting, as in something that carries you higher, above, beyond...

This is what I can’t quite take in about this book. The situations and events depicted are some of the grimmest and most harrowing that anybody has survived. The surroundings of the hostages are stomach-turningly filthy and wretched. And yet I lost track of the number of times that I laughed or grinned while reading it.

Hard to believe, I know, but as well as
being moving, sickening and frightening, it’s a wonderfully funny book. You might wince as you’re laughing, but you laugh. Through Keenan’s eyes, the sting of much of the horror is taken away by the utter surrealism and stupidity of what occurs. For him, this was the only way to bear the unbearable.

This is from his account of being ‘taken’. He’s just been pushed into the back seat of a car by four men with Kalashnikovs. First of all he causes some confusion by refusing to go down on the floor of the car, instead resting his head on one of the gunmen’s knees. This is his first conversation with his captors, as he half-lies in the lap of a fundamentalist terrorist:

" ‘You know where you go?’ Of course I told them I didn’t know where I was going. It seemed a lunatic question. ‘You English?’ At this point I sat up quite determined: ‘No…I am not English, I am Irish…Irlandais.’ They looked shocked and puzzled. The passenger in the front seat said something quickly to the driver. The driver looked at me, looked at his compatriot, and there was a moment’s silence again. ‘You like Thatcher?’ was the next question. I could quite honestly say with a smile on my face ‘No, I don’t like Thatcher. I’m Irish,’ foolishly thinking that these men might understand how impossible it was for any Irish person with an ounce of imagination to even consider liking Thatcher."

Keenan is taken, blindfolded, to a six-foot cell containing only a mattress. There’s a terrible irony for the reader as he manages to cope only by reassuring himself he’ll be there for perhaps two weeks at most, before being released. He is interrogated, fed, and allowed to use the rudimentary bathroom daily. The description of the bathroom, predictably, gave me the first real horrors. It has not been cleaned for years, and Keenan comes
to realise that the jailors would never clean such a place under any circumstances, their religious beliefs making them shrink from contact with their ‘unclean’ captives, especially contact with a place which had been tainted with their ablutions and excretions. The room is swarming with cockroaches, which nest in the pit of the toilet hole. The shower space is ‘a cubicle of filth’.

However squalid the surroundings, the mental aspects of incarceration quickly become the most difficult aspect to deal with. Keenan hears other prisoners being viciously beaten. When allowed into another room for exercise, he finds bloodstains on the floor, and a pair of pliers lying nearby. He makes a couple of abortive attempts at escape, but gradually hopelessness, fear and a dragging boredom begin to overcome him. Hostages are forbidden to look at their captors, and must cover their faces with a towel when being given food or taken to the bathroom, so for weeks and months Keenan is denied even the sight of another human being. The food is always the same bland offerings: bread, cheese, jam. The cell is windowless and bare; for ten hours or so every day it is in total darkness. He dare not light the few scant candles given to him, as, perversely, fear of the dark makes him hoard them for the future. At night he sweats under a stinking blanket to try to shield himself from the mosquitoes which leave him looking like a pox sufferer by morning. He panics, rages, weeps and falls into exhaustion and a sense of nothingness, of non-existence. As his mind ricochets from one state to another, he realises that this is the beginning of madness.

This is what I dreaded when I began the book; this is what I felt I could not face. The vivid description of a mind cracking, of despair without hope, of torture without end. You may have decided to stop reading this review at this point. All I can say is that the book gives the reader much, much more than it ta
kes.

Keenan is moved from one location to another, half-mummified in the boots of cars or back of vans, many times during his incarceration. On one of these moves he feels another hostage touch his foot, seeking or giving reassurance. He clumsily reaches for the other man’s hand, patting it. This is the first real human contact he has experienced since he was ‘taken’, and the small gesture seems very significant. On being taken to his new cell, blindfolded as usual, he becomes aware of another person’s presence in the room, after the guards have left. After peeping at each other fearfully, their eyes meet from under the blindfolds.

"The confirmation that we were both prisoners was a relief to each of us. Both blindfolds were quickly removed and for a split second we just gazed at one another. Who could this person be? My companion sitting on the floor and staring up at me suddenly broke the silence and in the most eloquent English he said ‘Fuck me, it’s Ben Gunn.’ "

(Keenan’s hair and beard have grown so long and unkempt by this point that he resembles the shipwrecked sailor of ‘Treasure Island’, however Keenan has little awareness of this, and not surprisingly, can’t think for the life of him who Ben Gunn is!)

The stranger continues, " ‘Hello, my name is John McCarthy, I am a journalist...You must be Brian Keenan... I came here to make a film about you. It was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.’ "

McCarthy had come to Beirut to film a news feature about Keenan’s kidnapping, but was ‘taken’ himself by the same group who held Keenan. Being in my early teens at the time, and far too wrapped up in my own ‘problems’ – hah! – to follow the international news, I don’t remember much about the situation, but I do recall Jill Morrell, McCarthy’s girlfriend, vigorously cam
paigning for the hostages’ release. I’ve read the book that she and John wrote together, and would recommend it, too, if you’re interested.

Anyway, Keenan and McCarthy, total strangers at this point, spent the better part of four years incarcerated together, in tiny cells. I don’t know if it’s unbelievable luck, or a testament to the characters of both men, that their forced proximity created a means to survive and, at times, to escape at least mentally from the hellish situation. Their partnership (‘friendship’ seems too weak a word) as a weapon against the guards, as a defence against their own vulnerabilities, is utterly life-affirming to read about. They see each other through times that could break the strongest person, if alone, and come out the stronger for it, together. Their different personalities and backgrounds and how they make the situation work, despite these gulfs, are fascinating and honestly described, often to Keenan’s discredit. His stubbornness in sticking to his beliefs often puts not only himself but McCarthy in extreme danger.

I mentioned humour earlier and that I was surprised that a book on this subject could be so funny. Yet laughter and a sense of the ridiculous is at times the only thing that keeps them going. They take to trying to out-do each other in baroque insults, or surreal crudeness, for the relief and freedom of it. It’s cruel and hilarious and it reads like a hymn to their affection and love for each other:

"The rich elaborations that we slung at one another endlessly with childish competitiveness intoxicated us. It was heady, monstrous, and foul. But it was gloriously imaginative and unfettered. We hurled this abuse with such pretended vehemence and at other times with such calm perverse eloquence that the force of it and the laughter pushed back the crushing agony of the tiny space. ‘John-boy, if I get out of here before you I am goin
g to go and see your mum. I’m going to tell the truth.’ I paused. John looked, screwing up one eye as if to say; what are you at, Keenan? I continued ‘I’m going to tell her that your language is appalling. You swear like a trooper and your imagination belongs in a dung-heap of a camel overcome with diarrhoea.’ John answered ‘My dear fellow, if you do I’ll tell you what she will say.’ He paused. ‘ "You are a fucking lying Irish bastard, now buggah off," that’s what she will say,’ he concluded. And again we were off laughing uncontrollably and the laughter of each affecting the other."

As usual, there is so much more I want to tell you about this book, but I see already that this review is far too long. The two men are beaten, victimised, separated, starved, reunited, and finally parted (in Beirut, at least) with Keenan’s release. At least I don’t have to worry about revealing the ending this time, as it’s non-fiction: Brian Keenan was released after four and a half years, as mentioned earlier. John McCarthy spent a further 18 months in captivity.

There’s just one more quote I really want you to hear, to convince you that this book really is a wonderful and uplifting read, and not just masochism for bleeding-heart liberals. It’s from when Keenan was still in virtual solitary confinement, before McCarthy arrived, and he has been losing his grip on reality and his will to live for some time.

"Another day. The Shuffling Acolyte (Keenan’s nickname for one of the guards) and I take part in our daily ritual, that long short walk to the toilet. That same walk back and I am home again. I don’t look any more at the food, knowing its monotony will not change, not even its place on my filthy floor. The door closes, the padlock rattling, and it’s over again for another day. With calm, disinterested deliberation I pull m
y head from the filthy towel that blinds me, and slowly turn to go like a dog well-trained to its corner, to sit again, and wait and wait, forever waiting. I look at this food I know to be the same as it has always been.

"But wait. My eyes are almost burned by what I see. There’s a bowl in front of me that wasn’t there before. A brown button bowl and in it some apricots, some small oranges, some nuts, cherries, a banana. The fruits, the colours, mesmerise me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head. I am entranced by colour. I lift an orange into the flat filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange. Before me is a feast of colour. I feel myself begin to dance, slowly. I am intoxicated by colour. I feel the colour in a quiet somnambulist rage. Such wonder, such absolute wonder in such an insignificant fruit."

He never eats the fruit, but gazes, holds and smells it in a kind of mystical ecstasy for days, till it rots. The guards try to take it away, but he defends it fiercely, knowing he is unable to explain what it means to him. I know, reading these passages, that his euphoria at the fruit is just another sign of how badly his mind has been affected, but I can’t help it making me want to dance with him. It captures the essence of what made me keep reading and reading, through all the terrors and evil the book describes: the fact that one man can find joy and wonder in such a thing, and use it to rise above his physical and mental torments in the face of the monstrous things done to him in the name of religion or politics – and dance. I’ve never looked at an orange the same way since.

Summary: