The prisoner

hy did I go to Lebanon?” ponders John McCarthy for what you suspect isn’t the first or the last time. “I have, as I’m sure you can imagine, had cause to reflect on that one several times over. There’s no one definitive answer – there were a billion little reasons, as there always are for anything like that. I can only conclude that I went because I was a young, naïve, keen journalist out to build a career, make a name for myself. I suppose I accomplished that much, anyway,” grins the 46-year-old writer and broadcaster ruefully as he holds court on the promotional trail for the astonishing film Blind Flight, a grim but effective document of his five-year captivity at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists.

hotpress readers under the age of 20 are unlikely to have instant recall of the names John McCarthy and Brian Keenan – a phenomenon McCarthy has noted with some relief – but anyone old enough to recall the late 1980s will remember that their fates were once a matter of daily worldwide concern. They were released separately in 1990 after exhaustive efforts on their behalf (McCarthy’s then-girlfriend Jill Morrell campaigned for his release tirelessly) and have since settled down and to rebuild their lives. Keenan won enormous praise for his 1992 memoir An Evil Cradling, an unsparing and profoundly self-reflective account of the catastrophe which won almost every Book of the Year award going, and it’s Keenan’s book which provides the basis for Blind Flight’s screenplay, which he personally co-wrote with the film’s director Johnny Furze. McCarthy himself, however, has also gone on to prove himself as a writer of considerable ability: in addition to the making of several television documentaries, he has penned four books. Some Other Rainbow, co-written with Morrell, documents his hostage years; Island Race, co-written with Sandi Toksvig, is an account of their circumnavigation of Britain; and Between Extremes, which he co-wrote with Brian Keenan, details their travels through Chile, in the process providing further insight into their huge friendship as well as an excellent example of travel literature at its best.
McCarthy’s most recent book, A Ghost Upon Your Path, touches on the author’s Irish roots, and is the result of a stint in Ardcanacht, County Kerry, where he travelled in 2002 to research his ancestry.
“I was always aware of my part-Irishness, if you like,” he explains, “whenever my father seemed in a grumpier mood than usual, my mother would say, ‘Being very Paddy today, aren’t we?’ But I’d never had much cause to reflect on it until, I suppose, being locked up with Brian. His initial reaction to me, as you say, certainly had hints of hostility as well as Anglophobia, but it was a bizarre circumstance for any two people to come together in. He’d let rip occasionally about British this and British that, a thousand years of colonial imperalism and the like, but I never felt that he was personally charging me with responsibility for it all. At least, only once or twice.”
It was immediately apparent upon their release that the two hostages were highly intelligent and fascinating individuals, and few who saw them are likely to forget either man’s post-release press conference. Both had responded to their plight with notable fortitude; both had somehow managed to come out the other side without expressing ill-will, hatred or rancour towards their captors; both spoke thoughtfully and movingly on their plans for what remained of their lives. McCarthy disputes my observation that he handled his unimaginably horrible trauma remarkably well, but there’s absolutely no denying that he comes across as an individual of profound resilience, empathy and good humour, all qualities which must have been put to the severest of tests during his incarceration. On occasion, he seems to border on gratitude: “In retrospect, to have gone out there as a young man without much direction, and to have come back much more centred and able to perceive other people’s experiences with more understanding, and become a spokesman for others, was a privilege.”
He’s aware that his plight was hardly without precedent: millions of individuals on the planet are locked up, many without just cause. He probably had little choice in the matter, but McCarthy certainly developed a stoicism that is genuinely heroic, much as he might wince when commentators try to canonise him a latter-day saint. As with his cellmate, McCarthy isn’t flippant or vacuous enough to spout the ‘no regrets’ line. On the contrary, he regrets his lost years deeply and irretrievably, but without any apparent bitterness towards his tormentors. If anything, he casts the blame in his own direction: “Obviously I had no pressing desire to get kidnapped, and I know I’m not responsible for the actions of other men, but I worry that I departed too casually to a dangerous place.” His massive sadness in this respect is largely bound up with his mother’s death from cancer in 1989, too early to witness his release, which was the first piece of news McCarthy received upon his release. The most moving passages in A Ghost Upon Your Path are those which detail his private grief in utterly heart-rending fashion, as he rummages through boxes of old letters and tries to make peace with his past. It’s a quest the world should wish him well with: McCarthy, a genuinely lovely man, has already endured far more pain than any one person should ever have to face.

[Photos: Cathal Dawson]

Blind Flight is now on general release