One of the history’s most enigmatic absorbing and controversial figures

Saturday, June 02, 2012

The Dream of the Celt

Mario Vargas Llosa (translated by Edith Grossman)
Faber and Faber, £18.99
E-book: Not available
Review: Billy O’Callaghan

With his first novel since winning the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, Peruvian master Mario Vargas Llosa has fixed his sights on one of history’s most enigmatic, absorbing and controversial figures.

Attempting to explore and understand the tumultuous life and ultimately tragic death of Roger Casement is no small task. A heady blend of myth and rumour, bloated for effect by one side or the other in order to glorify or slander, Casement’s true nature seems to exist only in glimmers: the humanity and courage suggested by his devotion to uncovering atrocities around the world; a certain idealistic innocence, as evidenced by the writers and artists — Yeats, Conrad, Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle, the sculptor Herbert Ward — with whom he became associated; and the less palatable but perhaps no-less-human crudity of the so-called and still not definitively authenticated ‘Black Diaries’, which portray him as homosexual, but possibly also given to paedophilic tendencies.

The facts, as we know them, are these: Irish-born, to an Anglican military father and a devoted Catholic mother, but orphaned at a young age, Casement lived a life of adventure infused with certain despair. Lacking significant formal education, he ventured to Africa, initially under his own volition but later as Consul to the Crown, and spent two decades traversing the Belgian-controlled Congo, bringing to light the monstrous effects of colonisation on that wild land and its indigenous populace. His reports to parliament and press in Britain helped expose the torture, rape and pillage, the plundering of natural resources and “crimes against humanity” committed in the name of progress, and made him a household name.

It was here that he began to seriously consider the plight of his own people. Long enamoured with Irish legends, he drew parallels between Belgium’s torment of Africa and Britain’s only slightly more subtle brutality toward his nation. On his return to London, and Dublin, in 1903, and under the guidance of historian, writer, nationalist and dear friend, Alice Stopford Green, he immersed himself in the majesty of Ireland’s past. With the ideal of freedom burning in his mind, he vouched much of his income to help fund such organisations as Clan na Gael and grew close to notable reactionary figures of the time, men like Padraig Pearse, Eoin MacNeill and Tom Clarke.

Then, in 1906, he reluctantly accepted a consul position in Brazil, driven in large part by financial constraints. This led him into a full-scale investigation of the British-run Peruvian Amazon Company and its cruel and at times murderous subjugation of the Putumayo Indians, who were being used as little more than slaves in the production of jungle rubber. After a protracted struggle against bureaucracy, corrupt officials and numerous death threats, he roused public wrath, toppling a previously-untouchable hierarchy. For his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian tribes, he received a knighthood from George V, which did not sit comfortably, but which he accepted.

Upon his return to Ireland, things moved quickly. The nationalists had organised, with thoughts toward insurrection. While vehement in his support of a free Ireland, he rejected the notion of open battle, one that, he felt certain, could not be won. He did, however, sense an opportunity. War in Europe was imminent and, following the notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, he suggested that victory would be far more likely if Ireland was to ally itself with Germany. Such were the circumstances which brought him, and 20,000 German rifles, to Kerry’s Banna Strand on April 21, 1916, three days before the Rising, and to his arrest and subsequent execution for treason.

Mr Vargas Llosa’s works have frequently sifted the sands of history, whether considering the Canudos revolt in Brazil, Paul Gauguin’s search for Tahitian paradise or Trujillo’s Dominican dictatorship. At first, the life of Casement, a figure whose most significant deeds have been largely forgotten, might seem an odd choice for a South American writer. But the appeal, magnified by an obvious personal connection, soon becomes apparent.

For such an innovative stylist, it does strike as unusual that ‘The Dream of the Celt’ should keep such a relatively straightforward and even understated narrative. There is little of the pyrotechnics and breathtaking linguistic bravura that so elevated ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’, ‘The War at the End of the World’ or ‘The Feast of the Goat’ to the status of masterworks; all emphasis here is on the story that must be told. Structured in three parts, ‘The Congo’, ‘Amazonia’ and ‘Ireland’, but with its lines of distinction blurred by the alternating chapters that recount Casement’s final three months of imprisonment, the novel builds toward an inevitable but still genuinely-heartrending climax.

In the short, summating epilogue, the author states: “The story of Roger Casement shoots up, dies out, and is reborn after his death like those fireworks that after soaring and exploding in the night in a rain of stars and thunder, die away, are still, and moments later are resuscitated in a trumpet fanfare that fills the sky with fires.”

Perhaps in the end it should not really matter whether ‘The Dream of the Celt’ is a biography masquerading as a novel or a novel constructed around the bones of a biography. Such definitions in no way interfere with the tale being recounted. This is a story that adheres as faithfully as possible to the known facts, but is essentially and necessarily re-imagined. And in raising questions regarding the selective and skewed viewpoints of history, and why we struggle to accept the flaws and contradictions in those we hold as heroic, it brings us close to a particular kind of truth, a sense of who and what a flawed hero might have been. Home