Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years.
Brian Keenan Books
September 28, 1950
Between Extremes
- 345 pages
- 13 hours of reading
During their four year incarceration in a Lebanese cell the authors envisaged walking in the High Andes and across Patagonia. Five years after their release Keenan and McCarthy travelled to Chile to fulfil this dream. The story of their journey revisited the past experiences whilst allowing them to live by their own rules.
The man held hostage by fundamentalist Sh'ite militiamen in the suburbs of Beirut was visited and sustained by the presence of Turlough O'Carolan during captivity. Now he tells O'Carolan's story, rich with the textures and smells of rural Ireland and peopled by a house of angels and devils. Turlough is narrated largely by the legendary blind Irish harper from his death bed, and through the recollections of those closest to him. It powerfully evokes a lost Ireland of famine and disease, eviction and oppression. O'Carolan's Rabelaisian desire for drink and women is counterpointed by his artistic struggle towards the great music and some kind of inner peace. Driven by demons and dreams, riven by contradictions, Turlough emerges as a great man, full of a blind man afraid of the dark. The book is a remarkable historical journey, and a huge imaginative feat.
