His mother, a housewife, used to say to him: "Politics stops at your doorstep.""But I never knew if she meant coming in or going out." His father was a telephone engineer and before that he worked on the buses. A sweet man. "I remember him bringing home all these injured animals he'd find on the road and mum telling him to get them out." That survival is mutual. Everyone there had to put a part of themselves on the table for everyone else to take what they needed." So, until the debt was clear, he would not be free to act. He is a very unusual man, in many ways no doubt. But in one way in particular. He is not prepared to be cynical. Unmodern, you could say, in that way. He hates it, and he hasn't got used to it. "It embarrasses me." A shy, modest man, he accepts it when people come up to him in the pub, offering him drinks, asking to shake his hand. He is polite and politely unimpressed. He doesn't want this fame. "I don't really understand it. What have I done? I didn't ask to be kidnapped." This is the book Keenan has written. An imaginative exploration of the man. Another kind of cradling, you could say, though this time benevolent. Keenan visits Turlough on his deathbed, comes into the room where he is dying, much as Turlough came to him in his room when he was in despair. And through Keenan's book Turlough is reborn not as a musician, not as a historical character, but as a man. "Fleshy, honest, frail, complex." And if this sounds like a self-portrait, it may be that, too. There are echoes here, too, of Eliot's lines in his great poem Journey Of The Magi: "I had seen birth and death/ But had thought they were different; this birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death." And ... "I should be glad of another death." Keenan is an odd mixture of the literal and the intensely poetic - both these helped to preserve him in prison. He used his willpower and his practical intelligence to make what sense he could of what was happening to him - he could kid himself for only a few days that they'd let him out as soon as they found he was an Irishman. And, as he has said, he used his imagination to escape into himself. Alone, for five months, he invented or rather elaborated a character, Turlough O'Carolan, Ireland's national musician, a 17th-century itinerant blind harpist, who became his companion. A strange choice, you might think, when he could have imagined some sexy seductress. But, as he knew, or was beginning to know, survival depended somehow on suspending desire, not promoting it. Men in prison, he says, think of sex far less than you'd believe. "That's an invention from movies. The men I knew in captivity didn't talk about sex much at all." They couldn't bear to.

Keenan uses various techniques to convey the feeling of human degradation that he went through during the first period of his captivity. This is nothing more than a feint,” Celegorm had whispered, he had implored Maglor to see reason even as the final preparations for Maedhros’ leave-taking were made. “This is a game of daggers and mirrors, and we cannot fathom what shadows lurk behind this façade. Nelyo will not see sense, he will not see the snare that loops before him; he will throw himself away upon the rash hope that a thief might relinquish that which he has stolen. This is madness, Káno, this is folly, and you must make him see it.” Slay any left alive!” A thin voice barked behind him, and with its words and the roar of orcish glee that met them, blank despair crested in Maedhros’ heart as he was led away. “Leave the dead to rot.”Why, Captain?” the deep voice called, and a chorus of snarls accompanied it. “He is a slave, for so we’ve captured him. We cannot take our sport with him?” verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Referring to his urine and drinking water going ‘From bottle to bottle, through me, this fluid will daily run’, Keenan uses these endless cycles of life to symbolise the monotonous days of his captivity. The phase ‘from bottle to bottle’ and ‘though me’ suggest a continuous flow, while the word ‘daily’ informs us of the length of one standard cycle. Keenan seems to live the same tedious days over and over again, making him feel lifeless and purposeless. Bind him tightly, now,” a Valarauka boomed, and the orcs seemed set aflame to hear their commander’s encouragement.

A tangle of voices jeered, and rigidly Maedhros held himself still as their scorn crashed down upon him. His brothers fretted as he had armed himself: Caranthir rumbled out his worries as a squire garbed Maedhros in a magnificent breastplate of burnished steel, Curufin scowled down at Huan flopped by his feet as Maedhros tightened the gleaming bracers upon his arms and rolled out his shoulders within his newly smelted pauldrons. Amras held tightly to little Celebrimbor curled up and dozing in his lap, and Celegorm stood tightly at his side, worrying at the cuticle of his nail until Maedhros was sure that he must have torn it beyond all repair. Finally Maglor ceased his worrisome pacing, the rhythmic tread of his steps had sent a faint tinge of nausea rolling through Maedhros’ stomach; he passed Maedhros his sword sheathed within its ornate scabbard, and with every ounce of willpower in him Maedhros forced himself to ignore just how hard his brother’s fingers were shaking. Sleep while you can, prince,” he said slowly, almost sorrowfully; and his words drenched Maedhros in nothing but despair. “For my home is forged of nightmares, and you will find no rest there.” Please,” he whimpered, and how he hated himself for it; he hated that he subjected himself to this creature, he hated that he begged for its mercy, he cursed every blind, arrogant, stupid decision that had cast down him so low, but still the words poured from him. “Please, please just let me go… Release me, and… “ Frenzied hands clutched to him; shrill panic trembled in Maedhros’ throat, anger and terror waged their devastating war within him but through filth-stained lips he screamed, “Stop! Stop, let me go! Let me go!”When he was finally released, Keenan famously told journalists that he intended to "make love to every woman in the world", before realising that imprisonment had left him horribly vulnerable and that he should steer clear of a big love affair. Then, having decided after all not to leap into the arms of the first woman who crossed his newly liberated path, he ended up doing precisely that: Audrey Doyle, who became his wife in 1993, was the physiotherapist charged with helping to build up his muscles again. And so it began. His re-emergence into a world he thought he knew, the world he had left behind, but different now. Not so much because the world had changed, or even because he himself had changed. But because his place in the world had changed. He went into the cell Brian Keenan, an unknown university teacher from Belfast. He then became Brian Keenan, the disappeared.

In his book he writes. "It is memory that ages us not time." The mind forgets nothing, he says. "I may forget things, but the mind doesn't." In captivity he found himself remembering details from his childhood, things that he didn't even know he knew. "I could smell the linoleum in the house I grew up in. I could feel, twirl in my hand, the earrings that my mother wore when I was a child and she'd carry me in her arms." So he knows, however much he says, what happened in Beirut is the past. "It's like a book I can take down from a shelf and read it and replace."Much as Turlough was able to reconcile his two worlds - Ireland the physical place with all its history, "which, though he couldn't see what was going on around him, he could sense", and his own inner life, through music - this book becomes Keenan's reconciliation, the means finally by which he can take control again of his own destiny. You could also say that it signals Ireland's destiny - which is not English control. "I do believe that this island should be one land." All of which makes it a bold book. Keenan is nervous, he says. "It hasn't gone out to the public yet. I think that maybe the people who have read my books before will find this a strange departure." But then this is, of course, its point. Well, I really hope you've enjoyed what you've read so far! I though a nice little battle-scene and its aftermath to get everyone warmed up... But genuinely I hope you liked it, and I hope everyone would like to read on, as I'm really excited about continuing this fic (assuming everyone doesn't suddenly turn around and go 'euuuugh no'!) Questions, comments or concerns are always welcome, either here or at the heart of my lair: markedasinfernal.tumblr.com Maedhros’ head lolled down onto his chest as exhaustion stole through him, the tightness of the gag tore at his lips and sent waves of such horrible pressure throbbing through his head. Despair clawed at his heart as for what felt like the thousandth time he squirmed within his bonds, he near ripped his wrists bloody in his attempts to free them, but such efforts were made in vain. Celegorm’s words turned in his mind, but Maedhros would not allow them to daunt him. For as the ranks of his retinue formed up behind him, as Gaelor loosed his banner and Orellë sounded a triumphant horn to the skies above, as the drum of galloping hooves filled his ears, grim, unyielding resolve settled in Maedhros’ stomach, and it would not be undone.

A sudden pang of hunger twisted through Maedhros’ stomach, but haughtily he lifted his head, and with as much defiance as he could push into his voice he replied, “I do not want it… Not from you!” The Balrog captain’s bellow seemed to reverberate through the very earth, and dread spilled through Maedhros’ innards. Not to myself. To myself I never disappeared, I knew exactly where I was." Crucial, this. All the time that the world knew nothing of his existence, he hadn't ceased to exist, though he had transposed worlds. His reality, confined though it was, was his own. He didn't look outside. "My recollection is that if you focus on the real world, which isn't your real world, because your world is here in your head, then you are going to make life very difficult."

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But inevitably there are reminders, some of them funny. "We were in a taxi together in London, and the driver kept looking at us in his mirror," says Keenan. "And then he came through on his intercom and he said: 'Sorry to interrupt you gentlemen, but I couldn't help asking … wouldn't you be more comfortable travelling in the boot?'" We march east,” a deep voice bellowed, and Maedhros flinched in horror as he felt himself passed between the company of uruks, they pushed him about as if he was nothing more than a rag doll until a fresh set of hands grasped him firmly, and miserably he stilled within them. “Collect what treasures you may from the field, but the elf’s sword and banner I claim in tribute to our lord. Make haste, we march with the shadows!” Wait!” Maedhros croaked; the words sounded pathetic even in his own ears but still he spoke them to keep that awful gag from his lips. “Wait… you… You’re taking me to him, aren’t you? To… to the Moringotto, to Angband…” Stubbornly - it is stubbornness that he considers his principal trait - he has resisted having an identity foisted on him. And this has served him well. But intransigence, as he points out, can carry its own terrible consequences. "If I believe something, I believe it passionately and no one will change it. It's awful. I am old enough to know better, old enough to rationalise things. But, with me, belief has to be a hundred per cent." So he can understand, he says, what happened in Beirut. "The ramifications of that sort of belief. Why they took hostages. How they came to murder six people. I don't approve. But I can understand it."