Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa: review
In August 1916, following his confused part in the Easter Rising, Sir Roger Casement awaited in Pentonville prison the outcome of a petition to commute his death sentence for treason, knowing that it would probably be turned down after the discovery of private diaries which, apparently, revealed his “degenerate, terrible vileness”. In a visionary half-sleep much like malarial fever, he spools back over his 20 years in Africa and seven in South America, during which period Casement became, in Mario Vargas Llosa’s estimation, “one of the great anti-colonial fighters and defenders of human rights and indigenous cultures of his time”.
Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a narrative master who believes in the mercifying power of the novel to reprieve characters like Casement from “the idyllic fabrications of history” – which Vargas Llosa demotes to “a branch of fable-writing attempting to be science”. All human beings, he argues in his epilogue to The Dream of the Celt, are made “of contradictions and contrasts, weakness and greatness”.
This belief has guided his literary career and compelled him to re-examine, through fiction, the lives of the Dominican dictator Trujillo (The Feast of the Goat), the Brazilian messiah Antonio Conselheiro (The War of the End of the World), Paul Gauguin (The Way to Paradise); and to explore the passionate mess of his own upbringing (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter). Offended by the “gloomy aureole of homosexuality and paedophilia” that has surrounded Casement’s image, and responding, one suspects, to parallels in his own experience of public service – notably the 1983 government investigation he led into the deaths of eight journalists in his native Peru – Vargas Llosa gallops out to Casement’s rescue.
Oddly, large stretches of the novel read like the conventional biography of a disaffected child of Empire. An orphan by 12, Casement was the son of an Ulsterman who served in India with the Light Dragoons; his mother died when he was nine. After working as an accountant in Liverpool, Casement – tall, reserved, outwardly abstemious – arrived aged 20 in Africa, where he invested his time, health and idealism believing that “he was contributing to a philanthropic plan”. Convinced with all his heart that the colonial enterprise would bring a decent life to Africans, he discovered in the jungle horrifying plunder and dizzying cruelty.
Full review at The Telegraph
Full review at The Telegraph