Between Extremes: A Journey Beyond Imagination

Between Extremes contains excellent descriptions of an awesome landscape and it guides the reader towards a penetrating and often surprising vision of the collective psychology of a society seeking to rediscover itself following the traumatic period of the Pinochet regime. At the same time, the two travellers seek to redefine their own friendship--this time in open spaces. --Philippa West

Reader Reviews:

Context is everything (1/2 people found this helpful)

If this was just a travel book, it would be pretty mediocre fare. However, it isn't. The 'extremes' of the title are not merely those of Chile, but the personalities of two very different men welded together by the trauma and ordeal of their shared past. Similarly, the journey is 'beyond imagination' not because of the almost unimaginable landscape of the country, but because they spent hours in captivity, imagining the Journey (and a rather more bizarre 'Yak farm').

How can two such different human beings become so enmeshed and sensitive to the nuances of each other's thoughts and behaviour? Well, read "An Evil Cradling" and "Some Other Rainbow", and *then* read this book. Suddenly, the journey acquires hidden treasures behind the unremarkable prose and style.

Stick with it - its worth it (2/3 people found this helpful)

John MCarthy was captured in Beirut in April 1986 and held hostage for five years. Brian Keenan shared the last four of them. The two men were thrown back onto their own inner reserves, amongst the fear and squalor of their tiny, ever changing cells, often chained and sometimes forbidden to speak. Using a shared black humour and their fertile imaginations they passed the endless hours. One of the fantasies they dreamed of was to one day start a yak farm in Patagonia.
"Between Extremes", written by both men in alternating sections, describes how, five years after their release, they finally travelled down the entire length of Chile to the Patagonia they had so longed to see.

Apart from a hairy horseback ride over the Andes, the book really does not pick up interest until the last few chapters when they finally arrive at Puerto Natales. But perhaps that's the whole point about both friendship and travel. There are huge amounts of time which are tedious, monotonous, things go wrong and get on your nerves, there are arguments and pettiness. Finally shining through is an affirmation of their underlying affection and a mutual tribute to the fact they kept each other alive in dark times. The yak farm would not become a reality, but they would never cease to be grateful for each other's existence, and tolerate each other's idiosyncrisies - Keenan's snoring and McCarthy's obsession with his psion and his fussy planning. I even eventually forgave Keenan his obsession with quoting Neruda, whose poetry I struggled in vain to enjoy, for the sake of his honesty and humanity.

What this book has really done is to fire me up to read each of their own personal accounts of their time in captivity.

Please, please give us a break (5/48 people found this helpful)

These two guys came to Lebanon and got kidnapped and that was awful (it happened to 30,000 Lebanese as well). But that doesn't mean they should be writing books about south America. Nor about Ireland. Nor coming back to Lebanon - in McCarthy's case - to make a film about Shia Muslims. Please, please, give us a break.

Fascinating insight (7/10 people found this helpful)

This record of the journey of Keenan and McCarthy to Chile provided great insights into the friendship built up during capitivity. The intimate knowledge of one another's thoughts and feelings proved fascinating reading and the tales of their adventures, particularly on horseback, enabled the reader to see the journey through their own eyes.

A great read and I would also recommend 'An Evil Cradling' by Brian Keenan which describes his experiences in captivity.

A good idea, but disappointing in execution (12/13 people found this helpful)

I had looked forward to this book, but I was regrettably disappointed. It hovered between being a travel book and an autobiography and didn't do either very well. A travel book should be about the country, its people and fellow travellers; the two men's relationship got in the way of this. But equally, the relationship was also inadequately described, and too frequently it descended into no more than amateurish name-calling. They obviously have a close though testy respect for each other, a respect and mutual support that helped them through their difficult captivity, but its description in the book was shallow.

I did however, like the idea that both authors interspersed their input and bounced the narrative between them. I enjoyed John's input more than Brian's, who too often wandered off into abstractions and over-emphasis quotations from Neruda.

Between Extremes: A Journey Beyond Imagination

Brian Keenan, John McCarthy

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