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By Tom Masland
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One of the first things Terry Anderson was asked after he emerged from almost seven years of captivity in Lebanon was whether he planned to write a book. "Now, there's an ideal" he said with a mischievous grin. And he has lost no time; the memoir, "Den of Lions," will go on sale next October, less than two years after his release. But his former cellmates, not surprisingly, had the same idea. British hostages Brian Keenan and John McCarthy both have new books on the market; Terry Waite's will be published the month before Anderson's. And outsiders are horning in on the action: "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me," a hostage drama that opened in London, is a hit on Broadway. How much of this genre can even a sympathetic public take?
Plenty, publishers bet. Advances to the authors total more than $1 million; newspapers and magazines are spending thousands more on serial rights. (NEWSWEEK will excerpt "Den of Lions.") So far, that confidence seems justified. In England, both Keenan's and McCarthy's books are best sellers, despite the fact that the two spent four years chained up within a few feet of each other. Indeed, the remarkably different books have only built interest in each other-proving, as Keenan notes, that "each man experienced his imprisonment in his own way."
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Keenan's poetic "An Evil Cradling," which he describes as a literary attempt to "imprison" insanity on paper in the same way he held it at bay while in captivity, topped The Sunday Times of London's bestseller list for nine weeks last year. When the more down-to-earth "Some Other Rainbow," by McCarthy and girlfriend Jill Morrell, debuted last month as Britain's No. 1 hardback, "An Evil Cradling" reigned as the top-selling paperback and quickly moved back up the hardback list. "Jill and John have had a tremendous knock-on effect," says Keenan's publicist, Alex Hippisley-Cox. "The hostage thing is back on."
Clearly, love stories provide some of the commercial magic. McCarthy and Morrell thrilled an adoring public with their recent engagement. "I've never seen a book signing where half the people cry and the rest bring presents," says bookstore staffer Matthew Frost. Keenan, who writes movingly of being in love, quietly married his physiotherapist last week in Dublin. The stories of the women who waited help distinguish the narratives. Morrell's account of the Foreign Office's coldness to her as she attempted to organize the "Friends of John McCarthy" has outraged Britons. Anderson's book, too, will include chapters from his wife, Madeleine, to serve as a counterpoint to his hostage narrative.
The books' main drama, though, is in the human will to survive. "People who have gone through the hostage experience are modern prophets," says Anthony Grey, who wrote "Hostage in Peking" after two years of solitary confinement. McCarthy hides behind a sense of the absurd; he and Keenan dub one jail "The House of Fun." Anderson examines his Roman Catholic faith. "Hate the sin, love the sinner," he writes of his early efforts to cope with his rage at his captors. "[But] how can you separate a person from his actions?" The prisoners sometimes clashed, but more often they helped each other through the bad times. Undoubtedly they will relish their reunions-on the new author circuit.
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