Giving war the bullet

There can be few more terrifying words in the English language than "Fergal Keane's most personal writing to date". This is the threat contained in some of the pre-publicity for Keane's new memoir, and an ambitious one it is, too.

This BBC correspondent has already set the bar rather high for personal writing, notably in his 1996 bestseller, Letter to Daniel, Despatches from the Heart, a sort of 2,000-calorie, double-scoop, caramel ice cream of compassion. (Sample sentence: "I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the memory, suddenly so vivid now, of every suffering child I have come across on my journeys.")

It is therefore a pleasure to report that Some of These People is a better book than we have a right to expect, in some ways an extended, fleshed-out reprise of some of the themes introduced in Daniel, but done with more finesse.

Unlike some of Keane's more priggish colleagues at the BBC, I've always thought it entirely proper, not to mention honest, for a reporter to show some sense of what he's thinking and feeling, particularly in Rwanda and some of the other obscene stories that Keane found himself covering.

I just wasn't sure he always got the proportions right; sometimes the emotions seemed to overwhelm the rest of it. But this book mostly avoids that trap.

Keane's father, Eamonn, as we know from the reporter's earlier work, was an alcoholic. Separated from him at 11, when his drinking helped break up the family, Keane, like so many sons, never ended up saying everything he wanted to say to his father before he died.

This book is Keane's admission to his father that, having spent much of his life resenting him and furiously denying any resemblance, they're actually rather alike.

The main revelation is that, like Eamonn, Keane fought alcoholism and insecurity for most of his adult life: doing award-winning TV reports by day, clearing the mini-bar by night; suffering blackouts and even a full-scale nervous breakdown, taking a long spell off work and wondering if he would ever get back. This is perhaps not quite as surprising as he might like us to think: many of the people who do Keane's sort of job, travelling to the war zones of the Earth, are insecure and drink toomuch.

Nor, from what he tells us, did Keane's drinking ever amount to as serious or destructive a problem as his father's. He mainly drank on the last night of a working trip, mostly continued to work as hard as ever, and few of his colleagues ever knew about it. But the book just avoids overdramatisation, as the old Keane might not have done.

I would have liked to have known a bit more about how he kicked it - "there was no big drama but a lot of pain" is more or less all we get - but we move on swiftly to Keane's decision, a few years later, to kick the other destructive addiction of his life, to covering conflict. It happened after Iraq, he says, when he just realised he was too frightened to go on.