Mario Vargas Llosa?s The Dream of the Celt reimagines the life of Roger Casement, a great humanitarian and one of the most controversial heroes of Irish nationalism

Roger Casement was just a fresh-faced 20-year-old Irishman with dreams of furthering the ?benevolent? causes of colonialism when he decided to go to the Dark Continent. However, when he left it 20 years later, the rough tides of Africa had burned away all the idealism and ignited a spark of vengeance and anger towards any form of colonialism. In 19th century, Europe was the hotbed of civilisation and they took it as a right divined by god to spread their brand of civilisation across the world.

However, Casement?s journey to further this had repercussions on a more emotional scale. He discovered a humanity that had been buried deep beneath the shallow chains of colonialism. Ironically, the British consul who had gone to guide the savages to the Promised Land, found himself questioning the very idea of civilisation he was propagating.

Mario Vargas Llosa, in his monumental work The Dream of the Celt, beautifully examines the transformation of Casement from the knight of the British realm to the ?incorrigible Irishman?, who was eventually stripped of his knighthood, his subsequent arrest and his ignominious death. The Peruvian author, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, reprieves the life ?one of the great anti-colonial fighters and defenders of human rights and indigenous cultures of his time, and a sacrificed combatant for the emancipation of Ireland.?

Translated by Edith Grossman from Spanish, the novel opens in Pentonville Prison in 1916, where Casement awaits his walk to the gallows. The narrative traces his journey and its end?as a convict?in flashback mode. Like a conventional biography, the novel attempts to cover the life of Casement, a disgruntled child of the British Empire. Born in 1864 in Antrim, Ulster, to a Protestant Irishman and a Roman Catholic mother, and orphaned in childhood, he worked as an accountant in Liverpool for four years before heading to Africa ?like those crusaders in the Middle Ages who left for the East to liberate Jerusalem?.

For most part of the 20th century, he became a British consul during which he investigated into the slave labour and atrocities committed by the Belgian Force Publique. His belief that ?he was contributing to a philanthropic plan? was shattered when he saw the cruelty and inhumane treatment subjected towards the natives in Congo by the imperialists.

For Casement, the culmination of his disillusionment may have been the sight of how a Force Publique officer mercilessly administered whipping by the ?chicote? on a small boy. ?The symbol of colonisation?, chicote is made out of the tough hide of the hippopotamus, ?a vinelike cord able to produce more burning, blood, scars, and pain than any other scourge?? He detailed all these findings in his Congo Report, which won him a knighthood.

Years later he would travel to Peru on a similar assignment by the British Crown to investigate into the Peruvian Amazon Company of Julio C Arana and the rubber plantations in Putumayo. There, he learns that it ?in spite of being so far apart…the Congo and Amazonia were joined by an umbilical cord?. He would come across men, women and children subjected to unspeakable horrors; they were burnt alive, branded, mutilated, emasculated and pilloried. His Putumayo Report further earns him recognition as one of the greatest humanitarians, but unbeknownst to the Crown, and notwithstanding the knighthood, he develops a fierce loathing of colonialism. His Irish patriotism finds an awakening in the heart of Africa and blossoms in the Peruvian jungle.

Though the narrative might sometimes read like a historical textbook account, it leaves no holds barred in meticulously tracing horrific scenes which were played out in Congo and Peru in that age. Detailed in graphic and a very matter-of-fact manner, it is ugly with an impact. At times no drama is the real drama in a narrative. This is one such novel. Layer by layer, Roger Casement?s extremely complex and labyrinthine persona is revealed. Multiple distinct facets of his personality present a vividly intriguing interplay. His humanitarianism, nationalistic fervour and his homosexuality (quite vivid in description) act as three simultaneous pivots for the narrative.

Interestingly, the novel wittingly or unwittingly becomes a potent platform to dissect historical figures like Joseph Conrad and Henry Morton Stanley. They were all present with Roger Casement at the same time in King Leopold’s Congo Free State.

Casement, who accompanies Stanley on his expeditions through Congo, came to view the famous African explorer as ?one of the most unscrupulous villains the West had excreted on to the continent of Africa?. And Conrad, who owes the success of his novella Heart of Darkness to Casement to Casement, famously said he had been ?deflowered? by the Irishman. However, while Mr Kurtz of Conrad was the embodiment of debauchery, a dying god consumed by the evils and darkness of Africa, Casement?s Congo Report debunked that belief. He showed that the Europeans introduced evil and barbarism into Africa with their greed and exploitation. Years later, both of them would earn fame for their narratives on atrocities, but while Conrad and his novel still remain etched in our psyche, Casement and his reports are all forgotten. He has been buried under the ignominy of being a traitor and a homosexual.

After his return to Ireland and with his initiation into Irish politics, Roger Casement starts working towards his firm belief that the only way for his countrymen to free themselves from the clutches of British occupation is through armed insurrection. Therefore, in 1914, during World War I, Casement goes to Germany to gain help from the Kaiser. But he lands at Banna Strand in 1916 to be unceremoniously captured by the British and sentenced to death. However, the fate of one of the most controversial heroes of Irish nationalism was sealed when real or imagined contents of lurid homosexual encounters from his ?black diaries? (the authenticity of the diaries are still under a lot of speculation) were revealed to the public.

Charged with the twin bolts of high treason and homosexuality, Casement was hanged as a traitor in Pentonville Prison in London, but as Yeats famously said in a poem written in his defence, ?the ghost of Roger Casement/is beating on the door?, the spectre of this forgotten hero still haunts those who dare forget him. And it seems Llosa has taken upon the mantle to appease the ghost of this hero.

The Dream of the Celt

Mario Vargas Llosa

Faber and Faber

Pg 404

Rs.499