If you liked Letter to Daniel, this new book by BBC journalist Fergal Keane, which contains much, much more of the same, is intended "as a companion". Letters Home is a collection of BBC broadcasts and short newspaper travel/ reportage pieces, plus some specially-written "lighter and more personal pieces", about his estranged father, his son, his old teacher, his failed rock-star career, his love of fishing, his love of good wine, his problems with his bowels in Angola, etc.
There are reports from Keane's BBC postings in Asia, Africa, and the war zones of the Balkans. Some were written for radio, and, frankly, these one-off pieces such as "Culture Shock in Chiantishire" and "Return to South Africa", which probably sounded fine narrated for a few ephermal minutes of radio, look uncomfortably precious on the printed page.
Many of these pieces, such as "In the Heart of the Country" and "Christmas in Cape Town" are not helped, either, by dire editorial intros which simper such things as "The author enjoys a career which often takes him far from his native Ireland: to Africa and Asia and to many other worldwide locations, some glamorous but all of them memorable . . . Christmas at the other end of the world. Spent under a warm sun, close to the beach, in the shadow of Cape Town's Table Mountain. A visit to church, lunch in a restaurant, some good conversation and, for young Daniel Keane, a chance to see the baboons." Gosh! What is this guff, BBC journalist meets Hello! magazine?
Whatever about the workaday reports from the frontline conflict zones having some merits for longevity, much of the more personal pieces sail right into the wind of narcissism. In the opening piece, "The Fur Trapper", which returns to his troubled relationship with his alcoholic father made infamous in Letter to Daniel, and attempts to find something positive about it, Keane writes: "I cannot write of him now or talk of those days without the tears streaming down my face, without a lump choking in my throat. It is so much unfinished business and the true writing of those times will have to wait until I can understand myself a great deal more clearly."
Writing as therapy in this manner belongs to private diaries and not in published books. Fans can obviously look forward to a further reworking of the father-son relationship at a future stage.
Rosita Boland is a writer and journalist
