The path from working-class Finglas to an OBE is hardly a well-trodden one. In Fergal Keane's case, it involved a lengthy detour through Asia, Africa and the Balkans, as an award-winning war correspondent for the BBC. The damaged lives and devastated landscapes of A Stranger's Eye, however, are those of Britain rather than Soweto or Rwanda. With no political axe to grind, and equipped with little but a supremely sensitive nose for suffering, Keane investigates a failing Glasgow shipyard, a drug-infested Leeds housing estate and the impoverished hill farms of north Wales. His voyage into the submerged third world within Britain takes him from down-and-out London to Castlederg in Co Tyrone and the UK's poorest region, Cornwall.
In all these bleak spots, Keane wins the trust of the local people and lends them a voice in a stripped, unflinchingly honest prose. No doubt his own social background helped here, as the child of middle-class parents forced onto welfare. The land he portrays is one of debt and dependency, of dank ceilings and urine-soaked hallways, thronged by men who have been unemployed for 30 years and women who hooked their adolescent kids on heroin. It is a country of young men who limp because they have injected themselves too often in the groin with drugs, a nation of shark-like loan companies and fearfully locked council flat doors. It is not a Britain which is particularly impressed by Tony Blair's bright-eyed talk of modernisation.
The poor as objects of sympathy or sensationalism have been a recurrent literary topic in England, all the way from Victorian forays into darkest London to George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier. E.M. Forster, with typical liberal self-doubt, refused to write of them in his fiction at all, delegating the task instead to poets and statisticians. But whereas Orwell never shows us a politically conscious worker, Keane writes of the struggle against a shipyard closure and the quiet heroism of social activists. These down-at-heel men and women are subjects as well as objects, aware of the squalor of their surroundings, some pathetically striving to cultivate a spot of decency in degrading conditions. Indeed, so far is Keane from a fashionable pessimism that he ends his survey on a curiously upbeat note: poverty in Britain will be beaten, he thinks, though it may take 20 or 30 years.
There is dolefully little to justify this faith. If Keane's lack of political nous is a gain when it comes to toughly objective reportage, it is a hindrance when it comes to prognostication. Thirty years is about as likely to see off poverty in the UK as it is to witness the end of adultery. Inequalities in Britain and elsewhere are steadily deepening, as the function of a global economic system which no increase in creches or care for drug addicts can significantly dent. The men and women Keane writes of with such splendidly unsentimental compassion are the wreckage of a world system which is in the process of mutating from one form to another, slimming down, shifting ground, shaking out, speeding up. The blunt truth is that the future does not need them, and treats them increasingly as fifth-columnists to be controlled. As capitalism draws its wagons into an ever tighter circle, the army of the dumped and discarded is likely to swell. Policing, not participation, is their lot. The next few decades are far more likely to witness a bunkered, beleaguered minority increasingly paranoid about its privileges, and increasingly prepared to defend them with force, than they are to see the end of deprivation.
This book, with its eye for the grainy textures of neighbourhoods where anyone who doesn't look "pale and exhausted and nervous" is almost bound to be a stranger, is properly unconcerned with such global affairs. It might, even so, have paused to note the fact that capitalism has been claiming that it will put an end to poverty about as long as politicians have been claiming to be sincere. If the political left had lied through its teeth so long and systematically, the fact would have been trumpeted gleefully from the rooftops by its opponents.
This starry-eyedness, however, is one of the few Blairite moments in an otherwise resolutely un-New-Labourish study. As an imaginative documentary, A Stranger's Eye stands in the great tradition of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, and like many an Irish commentary on Britain draws much of its shrewdness and vigour from being at once inside and outside the culture. Keane was actually born in London of Irish parents, and returned to live there only recently. He thus looks at Britain neither with the myopia of the native nor with the coldly objectifying glance of the anthropologist. If the place is a lot less alien than Rwanda, neither is it quite home. His uncle, an emigre from Kerry to Colchester, wrote the well-known emigration song "Many Young Men of Twenty Said Goodbye", and this sense of dislocation, the pull between home and abroad, informs a lot of Keane's own work. But as an emigre himself he is writing here about internal emigres, men and women who are becoming strangers in their own country. The beggars, junkies and ill-fed young mothers of this gripping report represent the flotsam and jetsam of brave new Blairite Britain, and thus send a disturbing message back home to Ireland. For whatever else the Celtic Tiger may be racing eagerly towards, it is certainly towards more busted, broken lives.
Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, and the author of the recently published Scholars and Rebels in 19th Century Ireland (Basil Blackwell)