Surrounded by family photographs and shelves of his favourite books (a well-thumbed copy of Moby-Dick is within easy reach), he is not far geographically but a world away from his childhood home in Belfast – and the equivalent of light years from the four and a half brutal years he endured as a hostage in Beirut.
That ordeal, 20 years ago, made him a household name. His extraordinarily insightful and honest account of it, An Evil Cradling, turned him into a successful author, while tales of a journey to Patagonia with fellow hostage John McCarthy and an exploration of the wilderness of Alaska established a new career as a travel writer. His latest memoir also chronicles a journey, this time into his own past – but it’s one on which he set out reluctantly, as a compromise with his publisher, who wanted an autobiography.
He readily admits that the result, I’ll Tell Me Ma, is not the book he intended to write. Instead, Keenan has once again taken a set of difficult, potentially disastrous circumstances and not only faced up to them but actively explored them until he discovered hidden treasure: in this case an entirely new relationship with his mother.
“Memory is like a Picasso jigsaw,” he says. “It was a coincidence that while I was working on the book and journeying back into my childhood, my mother was dying and going on the longest journey of her life. Through listening to my mother talking through the alchemy of Alzheimer’s I had a heightened sense of my own past.”
That involved uncovering some painful truths, largely because he grew up “in a time when parents and children didn’t talk”. Suddenly, however, his mother, Minnie, was telling him all the things he had wanted to know as a child, even if she didn’t actually know who he was. “One day she would be a child of eight, the next a young woman of 32, and the next she would be 22 and working in the mills. It was like my own memories when I was locked up: they come to you with such profound immediacy that you are suddenly dragged back to an incident or a relationship you handled very badly, or an opportunity you lost. But dealing with it gets you something very enriching,” he says, still full of emotion at the intensity of the experience.
Only once Minnie is beyond conversation does he understand how the stillbirth of a son weighed down on her for the rest of her life. He had known there was a boy who was born before him who was never named and never spoken of; now, though, he had been given a window into his mother’s inner life. “My God,” he says, “she carried that dead baby with her for the rest of her life and that’s what occasioned her to be the kind of woman she was.
“A lot of that had to do with her own upbringing. My grandfather was one of those hideously Victorian patriarchs, who was emotionally dead. I was beginning to understand how that carried on to the next generation and then I found I was beginning to fall in love with this woman I didn’t really like. I was falling in love the way a parent does for a child, the way a young lad goes for a young girl of 16 or 17, and a man goes for a woman. All this was being given to me and I was having to understand her empathetically through these different love stages. At the end of the day, part of me is precocious enough to think that it was almost like saying to my mother: ‘There’s the baby back.’”
Childhood is a very different experience for his own sons, Jack and Calum, now 12 and 10. Keenan describes himself as a “hands-on parent” who talks to his children more than his parents did to him. Yet he did not tell them about his Beirut captivity until the whole family did something most former hostages would have been keen to avoid, and went to Lebanon. Keenan himself had already returned with a television crew to make a documentary, but this time he took his sons as well.
“I did not want them to grow up thinking there was a place in the world that is intrinsically evil, because once you start believing that, you become sectarian,” he explains. “I was determined to take them back so that they could stand in the place and see it and smell it. Then, if they want to ask questions, they will have a more balanced perception.”
While they were there, he gave a public lecture and answered questions afterwards. As a result, Jack, his elder son, absorbed far more information than he would have discovered by asking questions of his own. “It also made it easier for me because I did not have to deal with me, the ex-hostage,” Keenan admits.
His fascination with Lebanon is deeper than ever. His initial decision to go there was prompted equally by despair at the stalemate of Northern Ireland politics in the early 1980s and an urge to travel. The irrepressible side of his nature bubbles up as he explains why he chose Beirut: “Someone told me the women were gorgeous.” But he was also attracted by the mystical power of this biblical place. He has also been back without his family or any accompanying journalists, and talks with infectious enthusiasm of his love for Lebanese food, Lebanese people and the beauty of the Qadisha Valley.
The sense of connection, however, goes deeper than distant memories of reading Kahlil Gibran as a teenager. “When I came home (after being held hostage) I came across old photographs of my father when he was in the RAF. I looked at one of the old grainy images and knew it was Lebanon – but thought it couldn’t possibly be. There, on the back, was written Qadisha Valley, Lebanon. It was one of those really strange things”.
Before his father died, very suddenly, Keenan had suggested that the two of them should visit the places his father had been to during the war. “I didn’t know he had been in Lebanon and we never got round to doing it but when I was locked up in a tiny cell, six foot by four, I had a sense of my father’s presence. I didn’t see him or hear him – and I could have been clinically insane, I don’t know. Then I came home and found this photograph showing that he had been in the Qadisha Valley, which is my favourite spot in Lebanon. So, in a kind of way, we did make that journey.”
Later, while filming in Lebanon, Keenan had an extraordinarily physical sensation of lightness and discovered that he had been within 100 yards of one of the places he had been held. He talks of these intense experiences matter-of-factly, but also with a sense of awe. There is no doubt that, despite his insistence that his hostage experience is now past history, it has given him an additional degree of insight.
He talks of a heightening of both memory and imagination, adding: “There’s a line in the Koran where the prophet is talking to his followers about the taking of captives and says, ‘Give them the Koran that they may take more with them when they go (meaning go to God) than when they were first taken.’ I don’t believe in the Koran, but that’s actually what happened. I was given more than I took with me. Would I do it again? No.”
But he will return. Inspired by a remark by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, who said that there were stories littering the streets of Beirut and the hill villages of Lebanon if anyone cared to pick them up, Keenan is determined to do just that, and he is now working the material into his next book.
The compulsion to return to the Belfast of his childhood was not unrelated. His quiet voice becomes almost confessional as he says: “I had to go where the memory wanted to take me.” The result? “I am nearly 60, and all the male line of my family died fairly early. I can’t say that’s not going to happen to me. What worries me is that I’ve left enough of myself to be a resource for my boys when I’m not here. My sons will find me in my books.”
Brian Keenan appears at Aye Write!, Glasgow’s Book Festival, on March 6.
I’ll Tell Me Ma is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £16.99.
