The title of Neil Belton's The Good Listener, winner of the 1999 Irish Times Literature Prize for Irish Non-Fiction, refers to Helen Bamber, founder of the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, who for more than 50 years has listened to the stories of those who have experienced more hate and violence than seems possible to contemplate.
However, the good listener could equally well be Belton himself who, over a period of two and a half years, listened not only to Helen Bamber but to the survivors she had helped, those whose stories had refused to leave her. In everyday speech, a good listener is someone who is non-judgmental, detached yet involved. Belton is all that and more. One senses that - to borrow a phrase he uses to describe David Bamber, Helen Bamber's sculptor son - "he can feel history chafing his skin".
"I'm very Irish and I feel in a strange way that I couldn't have written it if I hadn't been aware of political violence in the Irish context although there is nothing of Ireland in the book. I came to it with that awareness of what violence and political cruelty can do to people and that's why it had always fascinated me, I guess."
Belton is publishing director at Granta Books and has worked as an editor for 20 years, after reading English Literature and History at UCD. The Good Listener is not the first time he has dealt with the dark side of the human experience. He was editor of Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling and it was through Keenan and John McCarthy that Belton first met Helen Bamber who, through the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, had helped Keenan and McCarthy on their return from Beirut.
He became determined to tell her story. "Partly what attracted me to writing about her was that she was completely unknown, an ordinary person. There's no myth, she doesn't write, she isn't an intellectual. And that was part of the challenge: to actually use this unknown person as a prism, if you like, through which to look at this extraordinary history."
Helen Bamber was a member of the Jewish Relief Unit which entered Belsen in the spring of 1945. She was 19. On her return to England she continued working with Holocaust survivors, and later on, when she was 62, she set up the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, where she continues to work. In Belton's book, as in life, Bamber remains an enigmatic figure, which one suspects is how she would like it. In her work she is a channel for psychological healing and in Belton's sensitive hands she becomes a channel for our wider understanding of the appalling history of 20th-century political violence.
For Belton himself, the process of writing the book felt like a culmination. "I wanted to settle what I thought and felt about this looming sense of what violence can do to people in their lives, through the life of a human being who was extremely sensitive to atrocity, so the book is at least as much history as biography. I wanted to make it a piece of writing which reflected that as powerfully as I could make it."
Belton was surprised and encouraged by the enthusiasm he experienced for the project right from the start, because it is a difficult subject to write about. The Irish Times prize is particularly pleasing, he says, not only for the seal it sets on his work but also because of extraordinary personal connections. His tutor at UCD was Seamus Deane, "John McGahern was a teacher at my primary school and Declan Kiberd, who won it a few years ago, was a classmate of mine at Belgrove school and at St Pauls in Clontarf - so there is a sense, in some way, of coming home."
The strength of The Good Listener lies in Belton's ability to evoke the incomprehension that crippled these people, even more perhaps than the physical violence inflicted upon them - and to voice what they have long-since buried in silence.
Yet what is clear is there is inherently no difference between what happened in the death camps of Nazi Germany, the cellars of Algeria, or the suburbs of Chile or Argentina. Yet the truth is far from easy to discover. "It is not easy," he writes, quoting a survivor of Hitler's death camps. "You have to sift it with finer and finer sieves, one inch, three-quarters of an inch, half an inch, until you get some grains of truth that are timeless, authentic from beginning to end."
The Good Listener. Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty by Neil Belton is published by Phoenix Paperback