Memoir: Nowadays, fathers often get a bad press in memoirs written by their children, and in All of These People, the broadcaster Fergal Keane follows where so many have led.
In his account his dad, Éamonn, was a good actor and an indefatigable alcoholic. When Fergal was 11 his mother, Maura, left Éamonn and took her children back to her home place in Cork city. Thereafter, Éamonn was notable mainly, at least according to Fergal, for failing to show up when he promised.
This combination of absence and bad faith produced hurt and anger. Well, how could it not? These feelings were repressed (the adolescent Keane could not have functioned otherwise) but feelings banished to the cellar in the psyche don't go away. They just mutate and come back later as something nasty. In the author's case they came back as alcoholism (no surprise there) and as utterly debilitating panic attacks. These were so destabilising they put Keane in hospital, on one memorable occasion just after he had arrived in South Africa as the BBC's Africa correspondent.
The combination of raging alcoholism and galloping terrors were formidable. But Keane's good fortune (which also, in a curious way, was his misfortune) was his ambition. Ever since childhood he was driven to succeed and his chosen theatre (again from childhood) had always been Africa. When he got to Johannesburg he applied himself to his work with the same zeal that his father put into his drinking. Fergal also had the good luck to speak English with an Irish lilt and to believe that the journalist's job was to tell truth to power. A spectacular career followed and Keane became (an epithet he hated, incidentally) a sort of conscience figure to the English-speaking world. He bore witness to human cruelty but never stooped to Swiftian disgust, and he always found good wherever he turned his gaze. In his award-winning reports he made us believe that human nature, though awful, was not just awful. It was this capacity to describe horror without infecting us with despair that accounted for his success.
But the cost in personal terms was huge and the inevitable disaster came, bizarrely, during a lads' weekend in Spain. Hungover and panic-stricken, Fergal attempted to medicate with alcohol but for the first time ever, the drink didn't work. Instead of banishing the terror, it made it worse. He fled to London, sought counselling and admitted he was an alcoholic. Since then he has been dry. That was six years ago. By Keane's own admission this was the hardest decision he ever made. It was also, he believes, the most important, for cutting alcohol out of his life made his latest epiphany possible.
This happened in Iraq during the recent Anglo-American invasion. First at a makeshift road block manned by gun-toting Iraqis and a little later, trapped on a pontoon with looters behind and US gunships floating on the river ahead, he experienced gut-wrenching fear. Of course he had known fear before but whereas in the past he had always felt elated afterwards, in Iraq he did not feel anything like that.
On the contrary, all he could think about later (which of course was only possible because he was now a sober, middle-aged father) was what would have happened had he died. He would have been absent from his children's lives, just like his father was from his. And after everything that had happened this, more than anything, was what he was anxious to avoid. So he made a momentous decision. He would eschew dangerous war reporting in favour of investigative work. It was not an easy decision, but in comparison to stopping drinking it was a doddle.
Though All of These People is filled with people, Keane's focus is really on the road he followed that led to this point. He is the only character you ever get to know properly here. Now I know there will be those who will resent the author's monomania, along with his sentimentality, the use he makes of his minor tragedies (his father's and his own drinking), and the homilies that are sprinkled through his text. However, I suspect these nay-sayers will be heavily outnumbered by the fans.
It is a fact of modern life that we love and hunger for narratives like this that describe a personal journey that ends in wisdom, perhaps because we need to believe that this will be our destiny too. As in his journalism, so here again in this memoir, Keane displays one remarkable talent that supersedes all the others he possesses. He can not only decipher what the zeitgeist demands but he can seemingly deliver with consummate ease, and some grace too, that which makes us happy, the empowering story of triumph over adversity.
All of These People - A Memoir By Fergal Keane HarperCollins, 396 pp. £18.99
Carlo Gébler is writer-in-residence at HMP Maghaberry, Co Antrim. His narrative history, The Siege of Derry, has just been published and in July his new version of The Táin, or The Cattle Raid of Cooley, will be published by Egmont books under the title The Bull Raid
