Brian Keenan: Turlough

By PENELOPE BIEDER

Irish author Brian Keenan brings to his writing a more personal understanding of suffering and anguish than most of us will ever have to learn.

Soon after joining the staff of Beirut University in Lebanon he was taken hostage. It was 1986 and for the next 4 1/2 years he was held by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen, for much of the time shut off from all news and contact with anyone other than his jailers and later, his fellow hostages, including John McCarthy.

Following his release he wrote the bestselling, award-winning account of his imprisonment, An Evil Cradling, and he also co-wrote, with McCarthy, about their journey to Chile, Between Extremes.

But Turlough is his first novel. While in prison in the suburbs of Beirut, Keenan believes he was visited and sustained by the presence of Turlough O'Carolan, a legendary blind Irish harper and bard of the 17th century.

In this book, for the most part from his deathbed, O'Carolan and his friends look back over his turbulent life, tracing it from childhood.

We learn that he contracted smallpox in adolescence, causing his blindness. Thus he still has vivid recollections of the world - its colours and light sustain him in the dark. After he recovers and is in a state of despair he is taught the harp by an old woman - with music and poetry he communicates with all, from the family in the poorest hovel to the entertaining he does in the big houses.

A fierce work of imagination, with Turlough Keenan has created a visionary's world, and it is a world drenched in alcohol and emotion.

Ireland in the 17th century was a place of extremes, famines followed by feasts, evictions followed by patronage in a grand house, oppression from the state and the church. This is an intense story, loquacious, browbeating, angry and, unfortunately, at times unreadable.

Although O'Carolan is present on just about every page, it is hard to empathise with him, as he fights his physical and spiritual battles. His attitude towards the women in his life is enormously misogynistic and he finds it hard to trust anyone in his blindness.

And yet there are moments of poetry: "How do you know when it's real love?" [asks his oldest friend Seamus Brennan]. "I suppose it's as if you have been suddenly carried off by some bird of prey. You feel frightened in case the bird should drop you. But real love doesn't let you fall, nor does it make you fearful. It just makes you content."

But the dream-like and vivid episodes of his life that read like ancient legends do not make up for the long-winded passages of introspection and wordy debate, all written with no variation in tone or energy.

It feels ungracious and churlish of me to criticise this work when it is so obviously born of Keenan's dark, personal experience in Beirut. For instance, after the initial despair at his blindness O'Carolan/Keenan "remembered the indescribable relief and happiness, and the ensuing confidence and gratitude with which he had his first adolescent encounter with his inner light. The experience itself had not remained with such intensity, but something more important had. That was its 'essence'.

"Paradoxically blindness had bathed him in another light. He could feel light rising, spreading, giving form to things. This light had no opposite. Darkness was a word that those who looked outward, those who could see, used. For too many years he had kept this light hidden. It was so contrary to what people understood that he felt unable to share it.

"Even if he wanted to, he couldn't find the words to explain it, for he didn't understand it himself."

While a hostage, Keenan's hope and spirit must have been sorely challenged, something he would possibly have found hard to describe later. The parallels between writer and character in Turlough may be moving, but the battle O'Carolan undergoes to find inner peace becomes sadly tedious.

Random House

$26.95