The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Roger Casement had consistently disappointing experience with modern institutions. His work as a shipping clerk in a private firm in Liverpool had no adventure. His time as an adventurer in the Congo for the Belgian monarch lacked humanity. His diplomatic efforts as part of the British government on behalf of humanity had little practical success. And his association with the ultimately successful 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland led to his conviction for treason against his country and death by hanging. If he had survived into the Republic, I’m confident he would have found that Eire didn’t meet his expectations either. And incidentally he was gay, which did him little good among many institutions with which he had yet to have contact.

One might accurately call Casement a serial idealist. He moved from one idealistic fantasy to another throughout his life, seeking that true cause within an organization composed of other similarly dedicated true believers. When he failed to find the right ideal or a sufficiently sympathetic organization, he doubled the stakes, plunging into more and more radical causes until he ended up conspiring with Germany to free his native Ireland from British rule. He was, in short, somewhat of a social menace.

There are numerous poems, ballads, and mythical stories about Casement as an Irish national hero. Brian Inglis wrote his biography in 1973; this was republished 20 years later, and then again in 2002. Casement has been the subject of international television documentaries, a stage play, another biographical novel contemporaneous with that of Vargas Llosa, a graphic novel, as well as numerous articles, government reports and literary references. Casement’s memoirs, journals and diaries have been published and extensively analyzed in the popular and academic press. He is even the theme of an American country rock song. The man, in other words, has been well studied.

Therefore it seems to me odd that Vargas Llosa would choose Casement as the subject of this biographical novel. At times it is unclear if Vargas Llosa had decided definitively either to write a biography or a novel. He ends up providing immense amounts of historical detail but very little about what’s going on in Casement’s head, except his progressive disillusion with the way the world had been organized in his absence. There are no innovative insights, no obvious literary themes, no controversial interpretations as there are in his other biographical novel The War of the End of the World. Other than as a somewhat strident cautionary tale for today’s young idealists, therefore, I don’t see the point.

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