Brian Keenan recalls every moment of his release from captivity in Beirut. How, after four and a half years chained to a wall in cells never more than six foot by four, they came to him, out of the blue - "You go home Braham." They had always confused his name, calling him a mixture of Abraham and Brian. How they tricked him out of saying goodbye to his friend, fellow hostage John McCarthy - "Later, later you see him" - then bundled him into a car and took him blindfolded, his head on one guard's lap. "And him stroking my face." First to one room, where he tried to leave a message in a book, writing with a burnt-out match. Then, in another car, to the hills above the city, where Keenan was passed over to the Syrians. As they walked towards the Syrians, the young guard held his hand - not roughly, but like they were mates. Two people who would not meet again. "I guess they are all dead now. I don't say that with relish. And I don't know it for sure. But it's what I imagine."
At the Dutch Embassy in Damascus, after a two-day debriefing by the Syrians, they treated him lavishly, like a returning hero. He was offered anything he wanted. What he wanted, he said, was first an Irish coffee and then some chocolate and an ice cream. "Which is odd, because I don't even like chocolate." Kids' comfort food. But they brought him a full-blown meal, anyway. "Insisted on it" - knowing, or thinking they knew, better than he what a man who had endured so much deprivation must desire. "I couldn't eat a thing."
And so it began. His re-emergence into a world he thought he knew, the world he had left behind, but different now. Not so much because the world had changed, or even because he himself had changed. But because his place in the world had changed. He went into the cell Brian Keenan, an unknown university teacher from Belfast. He then became Brian Keenan, the disappeared.
"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."
In his account of this time, An Evil Cradling, he describes "a world in which nothing happens, and yet everything happens", and his struggle to retain control over this world. Now, he says, "In these conditions the mind opens up." As if the external constraints somehow operate to remove inner constraints. "You are in the dark, there are no windows, you can't see. But, tiny and oppressive as it is, you find in your mind ways to push the walls back." What he's describing is kind of liberation. It's a paradox he is well aware of - that in captivity he was somehow free. And yes, he says, there have been times when he has wanted to go back there. "Because the mind was so lucid and so fascinating. But, of course, I am not going back."
He came out and the world embraced him and he became Brian Keenan the man from Beirut. Not his choice. He describes his arrival back in Dublin, on a private government jet, as a series of baffled sensations. The noise. "People in the viewing gallery cheering." The sudden lights. "Flashing cameras. I was blinded." The red carpet under his feet. "I instinctively stepped off it. I hadn't walked on a carpet in over four years. Charles Haughey, the Irish prime minister of the day, pulled me back on."
Later, in the hospital where he was sent for routine tests, he suddenly noticed that the walls were the same colour as the last place he had been held. He asked a friend to get him out. The world's press was waiting for him at the hospital doors. "So Frank suggested taking me out in the boot of his car. And that's how we did it." He laughs because of the obvious irony - as though he'd been hijacked again. Which, in a way, he had. Caught in the captive glare of fame.
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."
He talks about a letter he received recently from a woman whose daughter is dying of leukaemia. "There's far more heroism in that woman than there will ever be in me." Now, he says, he turns down offers to speak about his experience. "It's the past. Why would I want to do that?" He has always refused to go to America to lecture. "I am asked and I say, 'No.'" Money couldn't tempt him. "Money has always been the last thing on my mind. Though I don't have a lot of it. I have to work, my wife has to work."
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."
John McCarthy once explained to me how between them they developed a way of dealing with the guards. "Brian would confront them, refuse to give in to their ludicrous little demands. Make a stand. Then I would negotiate away from this ..." And, as with the guards, Keenan is not renowned for his easy co-operation. No one could persuade him, after he came out, to write his memoirs before he was ready. "I had decided I would not write a book until everyone was out. They would all have their own stories, no way would I pre-empt anyone by getting in first." And if some of them hadn't come home? "Maybe I would still have written it, but I would have asked the families first. I would have had to. I couldn't have lived with myself if I had caused any hurt, because then I would have become my own little terrorist."
He had to wait a year before McCarthy was released in August 1991. And almost six months more before first Terry Waite, in November 1991, and then Terry Anderson, a month later, were released. These must have been terrible times for him. "No," he says, "not really. I worried at first, but I was always confident they would come home." Even after he knew about the deaths of the Americans? "I can't remember," he says, "when I found out that the Americans had been killed." He wrote in An Evil Cradling, and he reiterates now, that he felt bad about leaving McCarthy alone. He still thinks about it, and is not clear in his mind if he did the wrong thing. Though he had no choice, there was a mutual debt between them. That's what he learned in captivity, he says.
"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.
There is some irony but no coincidence that Keenan was born in Belfast - "the most political city I have ever been in". His personality was formed in that divide - the weight of one group oppressively bearing down on another. He was brought up a Protestant. "For what that's worth." And he was 18 when the Troubles started in 1968. "I suppose I could have got caught up in it. If I'd been a bit younger, had less of a head on my shoulders, I could have been locked up in a prison in Belfast rather than in Beirut."
His mother, a housewife, used to say to him: "Politics stops at your doorstep." "But I never knew if she meant coming in or going out." His father was a telephone engineer and before that he worked on the buses. A sweet man. "I remember him bringing home all these injured animals he'd find on the road and mum telling him to get them out."
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.
Though he loves Belfast, he kept trying to get out. He lived in Spain, in Brussels, did a community care course in Aberdeen. But he kept going back. "It's my city, my home and things were happening." But by the mid-80s, he'd had enough. "Belfast was falling apart." He had given up teaching, "because what the kids needed to learn they were learning on the streets and not in my classroom. And maybe they were right about that. WB Yeats wasn't going to get them through it."
Community work was more frustrating. "Because, whatever you tried to do, it just came back to politicians fighting and bitching." He was 34, "very discontent", so he made a plan to go to Australia via Beirut, where he had a contract in the American University to work for one year. He knew Beirut was a dangerous place. But then, from anyone's perspective, so was Belfast. He almost changed his mind. "I suddenly felt very apprehensive." Then the stubbornness kicked in. "And I am afraid of being afraid." So he made himself go.
Keenan is an odd mixture of the literal and the intensely poetic - both these helped to preserve him in prison. He used his willpower and his practical intelligence to make what sense he could of what was happening to him - he could kid himself for only a few days that they'd let him out as soon as they found he was an Irishman. And, as he has said, he used his imagination to escape into himself. Alone, for five months, he invented or rather elaborated a character, Turlough O'Carolan, Ireland's national musician, a 17th-century itinerant blind harpist, who became his companion. A strange choice, you might think, when he could have imagined some sexy seductress. But, as he knew, or was beginning to know, survival depended somehow on suspending desire, not promoting it. Men in prison, he says, think of sex far less than you'd believe. "That's an invention from movies. The men I knew in captivity didn't talk about sex much at all." They couldn't bear to.
O'Carolan became his companion. A way of distancing himself from what was happening to him. He helped to keep him sane. Psychiatrists, Keenan says, would probably have declared him clinically insane for much of this time. "And they may be right. But they may also be wrong." For Keenan, Turlough was a lifeline and he made a deal with himself. When he came out, if he came out, he would commit himself to two tasks. He would build a house on the west coast of Ireland, which he has done: a traditional cottage with the view out of one window of Clare Island and out of the other a view of Croagh Patrick, the holiest mountain in Ireland. And he would write a book, a novel, about this man who came to him in his cell and would comfort him.
Someone, trying to be clever, once said that the Irish are sentimental about causes but never about people. Keenan is a living rebuke to this. The only debts he wants to repay are to people - those who have helped him. In spite of his temper, which he says is terrific, his passion and his conviction, he seems utterly without vengeance. Anyway, he kept to his deal - built first the cottage and then set about writing the book. "It was a debt of honour," he says. "I was doing it for him and for me. To get the monkey off my back."
It was almost impossible, he says. He couldn't find a way of inhabiting Turlough's head. "I am no historian, I am musically illiterate, I can't play the harp. I am not blind." And apart from this he had never written a work of fiction. Quite simply, he didn't know how to do it. He'd start, chuck it in. Start again. He couldn't get rid of it. He was invited to give a lecture in Alaska on writing. It seemed a good place to go to get away, but even here he found himself talking about Turlough.
Some time after he got home to Ireland, he received a letter from an Inuit woman who had heard him speak. He could hardly make out her name and she didn't give an address. "I always reply to people who write to me however mad they may seem." She told him that Turlough is what is known in native American mythology as a dreamwalker. "Someone who inhabits dreams, who sees in his dreams. Who has, what this woman called, blindsightedness." Keenan thought she was nuts. But then she wrote again, and again no address. And as she explained more about dreamwalkers in her letter, he began to see a way through to the man.
What was known about Turlough was his music, his art. He is honoured and revered by many musicians through the centuries, in contemporary times particularly by the Chieftains, who have been playing Turlough's music for 30 years. Yet nothing was known "of Turlough's head and his heart".
This is the book Keenan has written. An imaginative exploration of the man. Another kind of cradling, you could say, though this time benevolent. Keenan visits Turlough on his deathbed, comes into the room where he is dying, much as Turlough came to him in his room when he was in despair. And through Keenan's book Turlough is reborn not as a musician, not as a historical character, but as a man. "Fleshy, honest, frail, complex." And if this sounds like a self-portrait, it may be that, too. There are echoes here, too, of Eliot's lines in his great poem Journey Of The Magi: "I had seen birth and death/ But had thought they were different; this birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death." And ... "I should be glad of another death."
In allowing himself this other death, Keenan himself is reborn. He doesn't see it this way, couldn't be expected to - rejecting as he always has the identity of the man from Beirut. But it is there in the parallels between the two men: the sensory deprivation; the interior journey; Turlough's estrangement from his own background - he comes out of the peasant community and is taken up by the Irish ruling class as their itinerant minstrel - much as the west would have had Keenan play its tune. And all this, as Keenan says, at one of the most brutal times in Irish history, the late 17th century, when the Protestant ascendancy finally crushed the Catholic opposition.
"It marked the end of old Ireland, the end of the Gaelic order, when everything was taken from us, even our language was taken from us. If the term ethnic cleansing has any meaning, it was there in Ireland three centuries before it was manifest in eastern Europe."
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.
When he was in the cell, he tried not not to think about love, and when he came out he wasn't ready to. "Coming out of that place, where there was so little in the way of affection, I was very aware that I could just fall into something." So he took his time, went off to live in a house in County Mayo lent to him by a priest. "I'd never met him, but he wrote to me offering the house." It was away from the media, there was no phone, no television. "No one could find me there." And he started to think and eventually to put on to tape his experience of those four years. One day, he was playing it back to himself, "and I realised I was just weeping, it all came flooding out, like Vesuvius. There I was listening to this man, who was me, talking out that cell, the tears streaming down my face." He remembers the day. It was, he says, exactly nine months after he came out. That's how long it took to give birth to the human being again.
It was soon after this that he rang Audrey, a physiotherapist he had met while he was in hospital. "I had rather cheekily taken her number from one of the duty rosters." Five years ago, they married and they now have two sons, Jack, three and Colum, 10 months. "People say Colum is a Scots name. But it's not. It's an old Irish name that was stolen by the Scots."
He wasn't sure about fatherhood. "I was anxious, still am. I thought, at 45, I was too old. But they are nice kids, lovely people." And tall, both of them are going to be over six foot. "As a small person I always wanted to be tall." When he was, his mum used to say to him, "'Be careful with what you want, you may get it.' So, she was right. I did get it."
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."
Beirut is part of him. Next week he is coming to London to see Terry Anderson, who is over from the States. Soon after, John McCarthy is going to Dublin to celebrate Keenan's 50th birthday. "Audrey said we have to do something, so that's what we're doing." So he says he is not the anti-social melancholic he has sometimes been cast as. "I have a lot of friends. And I made sure of holding on to all the friendships I had in Belfast before I became famous." What he is saying here and in his book is that there is not one past, but many different pasts. Pasts before Beirut to which he also owes a debt
• Turlough, by Brian Keenan, will be published by Jonathan Cape on October 5, priced £16.99.