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.” It’s definitely a strange and unsettling read, and about half way through I found I had to look Brian Keenan up on YouTube- to hear his voice saying some of these things, to know that he survived, to feel his reflective tone- I couldn’t carry on on reading with my own voice. Keenan uses various techniques to convey the feeling of human degradation that he went through during the first period of his captivity. Correspondingly, Offred is able to escape into her private world of memory and desire. Offred uses storytelling as a means of personal survival her narrative is the only way of bridging the gap between an isolated self and the world outside. "It is also a story I am telling, in my head, as I go along. " Offred is able to escape the intense feelings of claustrophobia through expressing her feelings. Atwood chooses short sentences to emulate the natural nature of speech resulting in a flowing structure. There will be, I am sure, a desire to know of the torture and brutality. I will not spare the reader but neither will I feed the voyeuristic vulture. I will reveal the moments of physical abuse but with extreme care and sensitivity so that what might be vicarious and even terrifying may be underscored with sympathy.

He is not yours to despoil.” The rumbling baritone of a Valarauka broke through the growls and mutters that heralded it. “He belongs to our lord, and I will see him delivered whole and un-abused, not torn bloody by your snivelling rabble. You answer to me, Dagmur, and I will have my captives treated with dignity, no matter how much it thwarts your desires.” All that effort for this miserable pig?” A sneering voice whined before him, and Maedhros started as amid the slurred intonations of misshapen lips, he recognised the corrupt, basal form of archaic Quenya, and the orc’s crude words seared through him. “Nar, should’ve gutted him in the hollow, left him red and gasping with the rest of them.” I believe that the author was trying to portray a story that was as close to the truth as he could get and as boredom was the over-riding feature of his confinement then it would not do justice to him or his imprisonment if it were 'jazzed up'for an audience. The author was very clear that the writing of this book was a cathartic exercise; I sincerely hope that it served that purpose. 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?'" 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.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." Keenan changes tenses abruptly, from describing the cell, to a present time, showing the way in which his mind jumps, to escape his present situation. However, in "Into the Bread Basket" Keenan's senses were shut down by the "tight confinement of the tape" which "will not let my mind escape. " Now that even his mind cannot escape he feels as if a "riot is bursting out within my senses" which further reflects how his repressed senses are desperate to escape the confinement, without his freedom of mind Keenan finds himself completely trapped. A dissenting grumble rolled through the orcs, but slowly they shuffled off, and relief poured through Maedhros’ heart as he heard them depart. Yet setting towards him then he heard the heavy tread of the captain; unseen things crunched to the stones by his side, and swiftly he steeled himself, he drew to himself whatever shreds of lordliness he had left and thrust them out before him like a shield.

Yet even as that resolution turned in his mind, unbidden anger churned in his blood, and hard he gripped into the edge of the table to still the shake in his fingers. The Oath, that accursed oath sworn in fey mood and wrathful flames pounded in his veins and it renounced all clemency, it thirsted for blood, it crooned for war, but Maedhros would not so easily succumb to its seduction. Strength in arms might not avail his kin in reclaiming the Silmarils; their armies reeled in the wake of his father’s death, they mourned their kindred slain in the battle under the silent stars and wished no more for conflict, and Maedhros would not see the blood of his people further spilled upon capricious whim. The Oath renewed at his father’s deathbed might gnaw at him, and his brothers also; it would cozen patience to careless haste, it would twist sense to base impulse, but he would not fall prey to its demands. Keenan's parents are both dead – his father's death was pivotal in his decision to go to Beirut. It was as he carried his father's coffin that he made the decision to leave Belfast, and to seek a new life overseas as a teacher at the American University in Beirut. At the time of the kidnap he was wearing one of his father's shirts, and that connection was a crumb of comfort to him – in An Evil Cradling, he writes movingly about how his dad became "not simply a memory but … a real presence … a presence I could feel more than see, a comforting reassurance that eased the hurt into a deeply filled sadness, yet that same sadness as it became reflective, lifted me". His mother died in 2004 having survived his captivity – something she rarely spoke about, Keenan says. "It was her way," he explains. "When I came home she didn't ask, and I didn't tell much at all. My sisters told me that when I was away she didn't speak much about what was happening. When there were rumours that I might be coming home, though, she knitted me a sweater." 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?” There are occasional beatings but at no point did I feel that the author was in danger of losing his life, those beatings said more about some of his jailers that it did about him; some were sociopaths who were often just as bored and frustrated as the prisoners. Not a great combination. 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.

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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." Fury swelled in Maedhros’ heart as he saw their lines break into a sprint, the outrage of betrayal squalled in his veins but tightly he gripped to it, he mastered it, and as Fëanor’s son revealed in the fey glory of his wrath he drew his sword, and aloud he cried: “Hold fast! Ortaerë, mehtarnya! Ortaerë!” Atwood constantly uses similes throughout that are reminiscent of the past. These similes present an escape from the routine regime; they often involve the senses which allow Offred to escape the regime by remembering and juxtaposing elements and senses of the past. " It's almost like June," Offred shifts in mental perspective via association of seasons, Offred's memories of the seasons are superimposed over Gilead's charade of normality, it is as though Offred escapes into her own private narrative underneath her imprisonment as a handmaid her recollections act as freedom from the past.

This is the kind of book that leaves you ruminating. Like a good meal or sermon, you want to glean every last nuance and morsel from it ensuring that nothing is lost, that it all sinks in. A little like Primo Levi's 'If this is a Man' this book leaves you with a sense of awe, reverence even, for this 'beauty of the world, this paragon of animals', for what we are and what we are capable of. It reveals a depth of spirit, a nobility of character and the sheer belligerent will that enables one to fight in the face of inhumane behaviour as well as a sadness at how far short we often fall. A tangle of voices jeered, and rigidly Maedhros held himself still as their scorn crashed down upon him. One by one they were slain; the Noldor’s tight defensive knot frayed as the orcs gnawed at it, as the Valaraukar unravelled it; and Maedhros screamed out his hatred as he felt the rush of sundered fëar envelop him, and loathing bubbled in him that his friends might have been defiled so cruelly. For how dare the Moringotto think to cross him; viciously he decapitated the squat orc who leapt at him and sent its grotesque skull tumbling; how dare Morgoth renege upon his vows, how dare he lull the Noldor to their slaughter like some craven, honourless dog; and as the warm splatter of orcish ichor drenched him, a feral snarl ripped across Maedhros’ face. Keenan took his destiny in his hands, dropping out of the plumber's apprenticeship he started, getting himself to university to read English literature, and then becoming a teacher: the only kid in his street, as he has often said - and not in a self- congratulatory manner - to do so.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." It is a heartfelt reflection on the authors time as a hostage in Lebanon. As an Irishman going there to teach, there was no logical reason for him to have been captured by the fundamentalist militia but captured and held he was and he eloquently writes of the experience describing the frustration, the squalor, the brutality, solitude, torment, torture and beatings.

Few people have been where these men have been, but everybody can take something away from their experience and find enrichment or hope especially when it is shared as honestly and eloquently s this. This book then is like a map on the life of the soul, marking the primal, wild, less travelled territory, frightening extremes of humanity's collective madness, need of redemption, and maybe even charting a way through it into compassion, brotherhood and community. Brian Keenan is not just a good writer; his prose is poetic, descriptive and eloquent, but he is also a good thinker. A true philosopher with the capacity to honestly and unflinchingly look fallen man, the human shadow, in the face, within and without, in all it's ignorance, fear and brutality and over come it with faith, truth, dignity, humour and reason and in doing so, again akin to Primo Levi, he discovers himself; he is humanised, ennobled and empowered through the process. Y’hear that, snaga,” a deep voice growled, and an iron-shod boot clipped into the side of Maedhros’ thigh an instant later. “My boys should ‘ave their fun with you. Such troubles we took with you, you might give us a little pleasure in return…”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." Margret Atwood's fictive autobiography 'The Handmaid's Tale' And Brian Keenan's autobiography, 'An Evil Cradling' documenting his kidnapping by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen both present a sense of claustrophobia. Each novel presents tional. strophobia Keenan' the manifestation of claustrophobia within the protagonists. 'An Evil Cradling' presents Keenan's physical claustrophobia as a hostage and the emotional entrapment. Both authors successfully create a sense of claustrophobia whilst exploring the different situations of both protagonists.