Hostage to adversity finds a match forged in friendship
The Age
Saturday February 27, 2010
Storming the battle lines of fate, an intrepid newsman makes an offer that's fit to print. Robert Drewe continues his story of a friend. FANS of the bestselling English author Nicholas Evans might remember that 18 months ago I mentioned the stranger-than-fictive fate that had befallen my friend, the author of The Horse Whisperer and other blockbusters, who was poisoned after eating wild mushrooms in Scotland.While on a Highlands country ramble in August 2008, on the Altyre Estate of his brother-in-law Sir Alistair Gordon-Cumming, Nick Evans ate a fungus called Cortinarius speciosissimus, or fool's webcap. So did his wife Charlotte, her brother Sir Alistair, and his wife Louisa. They were all poisoned.Fool's webcap mushrooms can damage the liver, kidneys and spinal cord and reduce the organs to pulp."I've been better," Nick told me then.Sir Alistair, chief of the Clan Cumming, said: "We are all lucky to be alive. Unfortunately, there isn't a book that can be consulted about the long-term effects on us."Well, what happened was their kidneys were destroyed.If the real-life ups and downs of Nick Evans' life were written as fiction, they'd be dismissed as over the top, the stuff of airport novels. The journey from debt-ridden journalist and struggling TV and film producer to multimillionaire author (The Horse Whisperer alone sold 15 million copies) really did happen overnight.I'd met him 20 years ago when he was working in Sydney. After a law degree at Oxford, he'd already served in Africa with Voluntary Service Overseas and was supporting a young family while researching global current-affairs ideas for television.One night at dinner in London he was bemoaning a demeaning visit to his bank manager that day, seeking a second mortgage on his house. Next day, at the Frankfurt book fair, collared by Nick's astute agent, Robert Redford bought the film rights to his still incomplete manuscript, and changed his life. With the attendant publicity, The Horse Whisperer's publication and success were guaranteed. Other novels, The Loop and The Smoke Jumper, followed, also selling millions of copies around the world.Nick Evans, already charming, athletic, intelligent and handsome, became extremely rich as well. He travelled the world like a mild-mannered rock star. His long marriage broke up. He married again, to the songwriter Charlotte Gordon-Cumming, and bought a big house in Devon.Nowadays, he is on dialysis three times a week, for five hours each time, and facing the endless queue of Britons awaiting a kidney transplant. And here the story takes another turn. Enter Charles Glass, the famously intrepid Anglo-American journalist, author and broadcaster. Glass is the foreign correspondent from central casting who has managed to both cover and be the news ever since turning up in the Arab-Israeli War in 1973 as a 22-year-old. Wounded in artillery fire in Lebanon in 1976, he recovered and made the Middle East his speciality, then expanded his territory to include the Balkans, South-East Asia and the Mediterranean. In 1986, he interviewed the hostage crew of TWA flight 847 on the tarmac of Beirut airport. He broke the news that the hijackers had removed the passenger hostages from the plane and hidden them in the suburbs of Beirut, causing the Reagan administration to abort a rescue attempt.In 1987, Glass was himself abducted by Shiite Muslims and held hostage for two months before escaping from his captors. The next year, he exposed Saddam Hussein's then-secret biological weapons program. The US government rejected Glass' claims until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990; he then busied himself as the only correspondent covering the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq.A year later, with a hidden camera, he went alone to Indonesian-occupied East Timor. Despite Indonesian restrictions, he filmed and filed a report on repression and torture that influenced a US Senate committee to suspend US military aid to Indonesia. Since then he has covered strife in Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and, of course, Iraq.Back to Nick Evans and his mushroom-poisoned kidneys. In a recent email he said that he's jogging three times a week, when he's not on dialysis, and "feeling fit most of the time." He also says: "Dear Charlie Glass has offered me a kidney, and so far the matching looks good."Nick says he has also been "working hell for leather, finishing the new book". I wonder what it will be about.NEXT WEEK KATE HOLDEN
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