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The dream of the Celt : [a novel]
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2012
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Dream of the Celt, The THE CONGO I When they opened the door to his cell, the street noise that the stone walls had muffled came in along with the stream of light and a blast of wind, and Roger woke in alarm. Blinking, still confused, struggling to calm down, he saw the shape of the sheriff leaning in the doorway. His flabby face, with its blond mustache and reproachful little eyes, contemplated Roger with a dislike he had never tried to hide. This was someone who would suffer if the British government granted his request for clemency. "Visitor," muttered the sheriff, not taking his eyes off him. He stood, rubbing his arms. How long had he slept? Not knowing the time was one of the torments of Pentonville Prison. In Brixton Prison and the Tower of London he had heard the bells that marked the half hour and the hour; here, thick walls kept the clamor of the church bells along the Caledonian Road and the noise of the Islington market from reaching the prison interior, and the guards posted at the door strictly obeyed the order not to speak to him. The sheriff put handcuffs on him and indicated that he should walk behind. Was his lawyer bringing him good news? Had the cabinet met and reached a decision? Perhaps the sheriff's gaze was more filled than ever with the anger he inspired in him because his sentence had been commuted. He walked down the long passageway of red brick blackened by grime, past the metal doors of the cells and the discolored walls where every twenty or twenty-five paces a high barred window allowed him to glimpse a small piece of gray sky. Why was he so cold? It was July, the heart of summer, there was no reason for the icy cold that gave him goose bumps. When he entered the narrow visitors' room, his heart sank. Waiting for him was not his attorney, Maître George Gavan Duffy, but one of his assistants, a blond, sickly looking young man with prominent cheekbones who dressed like a fop and whom he had seen during the four days of his trial, carrying and fetching papers for the defense lawyers. Why, instead of coming in person, had Maître Gavan Duffy sent one of his clerks? The young man looked at him coldly. Anger and disgust were in his eyes. What was wrong with this imbecile? He looks at me as if I were vermin , thought Roger. "Any news?" The young man shook his head. He inhaled before speaking: "Regarding the petition for pardon, not yet," he murmured drily, making a face that made him look even sicklier. "It is necessary to wait for the Council of Ministers to meet." The presence of the sheriff and another guard in the small room irritated Roger. Though they remained silent and motionless, he knew they were listening to everything. The idea oppressed his chest and made it difficult for him to breathe. "But considering recent events," the blond young man added, blinking for the first time and opening and closing his mouth in an exaggerated way, "everything is more difficult now." "Outside news doesn't reach Pentonville. What happened?" What if the German admiralty had finally decided to attack Great Britain from the Irish coast? What if the dreamed-of invasion had taken place and the Kaiser's cannon were at this very moment avenging the Irish patriots shot by the British in the Easter Rising? If the war had taken that direction, his plans would be realized in spite of everything. "Now it has become difficult, perhaps impossible, to succeed," the clerk repeated. He was pale, and Roger detected his skull beneath the whitish skin of his complexion. He sensed that behind him the sheriff was smiling. "What are you talking about? Mr. Gavan Duffy was optimistic about the petition. What happened to make him change his mind?" "Your diaries," the young man hissed, making another disgusted face. He had lowered his voice and it was difficult for Roger to hear him. "Scotland Yard found them in your house on Ebury Street." He paused for a long time, waiting for Roger to say something.But since he had fallen mute, the clerk gave free rein to his indignation and twisted his mouth: "My good man, how could you be so stupid?" He spoke slowly, making his rage more obvious. "How could you, my good man, put such things on paper? And if you did, how could you not take the basic precaution of destroying those diaries before embarking on a conspiracy against the British Empire?" It's an insult for this fellow to call me "my good man," Roger thought. Ill-mannered because Roger was at least twice the age of this affected boy. "Portions of those diaries are circulating everywhere now," the clerk added, calmer, though his disgust was constant, not looking at him now. "In the admiralty, the minister's spokesman, Captain Reginald Hall himself, has given copies to dozens of reporters. They're all over London. In parliament, the House of Lords, Liberal and Conservative clubs, editorial offices, churches. It's the only topic of conversation in the city." Roger did not say anything. He did not move. Once again he had the strange sensation that had taken hold of him many times in recent months, ever since that gray, rainy April morning in 1916 when, numb with cold, he was arrested in the ruins of McKenna's Fort, in the south of Ireland: this did not have to do with him, they were talking about someone else, these things were happening to someone else. "I know your private life is not my business, or Mr. Gavan Duffy's, or anyone's," added the young clerk, making an effort to lower the fury that saturated his voice. "This is a strictly professional matter. Mr. Gavan Duffy wanted to bring you up to date regarding the situation. And prepare you. The request for clemency may be compromised. This morning there are already protests in some newspapers, confidences betrayed, rumors regarding the content of your diaries. The favorable public response to the petition might be affected. Merely a supposition, of course. Mr. Gavan Duffy will keep you informed. Do you wish me to give him a message?" With an almost imperceptible movement of his head, the prisoner refused. He turned immediately afterward, facing the door of the visitors' room. With his chubby face the sheriff signaled the guard, who unbolted the door and opened it. The return to his cell seemed interminable. During his passage down the long hall withthe rocklike walls of blackened red brick, he had the feeling that at any moment he might trip and fall facedown on those damp stones and not get up again. When he reached the metal door of his cell, he remembered: on the day they brought him to Pentonville Prison, the sheriff had told him that, without exception, all the prisoners who occupied this cell had ended up on the gallows. "Could I take a bath today?" he asked before he went in. The fat jailer shook his head, looking into his eyes with the same repugnance Roger had detected in the clerk's gaze. "You cannot bathe until the day of your execution," said the sheriff, relishing each word. "And, on that day, only if it's your final wish. Others, instead of a bath, prefer a good meal. A bad business for Mr. Ellis, because then, when they feel the noose, they shit themselves. And leave the place like a pigsty. Mr. Ellis is the hangman, in case you didn't know." When he heard the door close behind him, he lay facedown on the narrow cot and closed his eyes. It would have been good to feel the cold water from that spout invigorating his skin and turning it blue with cold. In Pentonville the convicts, except for those condemned to death, could bathe with soap once a week in that stream of cold water. And the conditions in the cells were passable. On the other hand, he recalled with a shudder the filth in Brixton, where he had been covered with lice and fleas that swarmed in the mattress on his cot and covered his back, legs, and arms with bites. He attempted to think about that, but over and over he kept remembering the disgusted face and hateful voice of the blond clerk decked out like a dandy whom Maître Gavan Duffy had sent instead of coming in person to give him the bad news. Copyright (c) 2010 by Mario Vargas Llosa Excerpted from The Dream of the Celt: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Fiction/Biography Profile
Characters
Vargas Llosa (Male),
Roger Casement (Male), Irish, Knighted for exposing greed and abuse; in prison for treasure;
Genre
Historical
Fiction
Topics
History
Irish culture
Human rights
Rebellion
Insurrections
Latin Americans
Multiculturalism
Time Period
1864-1916 -- 19th-20th Century
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Trade Reviews
New York Times Review
JOSEPH CONRAD wasn't the only literary European who traveled through the Congo basin during the 19th-century rush to harvest the region's ivory, animal hides, minerals and especially its "black gold" - the liquid latex that welled in its rubber trees. While journeying by caravan to Léopoldville in 1890 to take charge of the merchant ship Le Roi des Belges, Conrad met Roger Casement, a handsome 25-year-old Irish do-gooder who had lived and worked in the Congo Free State for the past few years. Like Conrad, Casement had come to Africa buoyed by the conviction that European colonization would bring moral and social progress to the continent and free its inhabitants "from slavery, paganism and other barbarities." Each man would soon learn the gravity of his error. For Casement, the turning point may have been the sight of a Belgian officer of the Force Publique mercilessly whipping an unconscious Congolese boy with a chicote, a "vinelike cord" made of hippo hide, known for its ability to "produce more burning, blood, scars and pain than any other scourge." Later, while traveling through Peru on assignment for the British government, Casement would come across men, women and children who had been branded, beaten, pilloried, mutilated and enslaved by rapacious employees of the rubber companies. Years later, both Conrad and Casement earned fame for their accounts of the atrocities they encountered; but while Conrad and his short novel "Heart of Darkness" would be remembered, Casement and his reports on human rights abuses in Congo and Amazonia would be all but forgotten, overshadowed by his ignominious end. In his latest novel, "The Dream of the Celt," the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa unearths the achievements of this complicated man of conscience, reasserting his credentials as "one of the great anticolonial fighters and defenders of human rights and indigenous cultures of his time, and a sacrificed combatant for the emancipation of Ireland." Although Casement was an Irishman (born in 1864 to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother, and orphaned in childhood), he spent most of the first decade of the 20th century as a British consul, investigating working conditions on rubber plantations in Congo and Peru. His reports, which stirred public outrage, earned him a knighthood in 1911. This honor notwithstanding, Casement's loathing of colonialism gradually led him to see England as an enemy occupier and turned him into a fervent Irish nationalist. In 1914, in the early months of World War I, Casement traveled to Germany with his perfidious Norwegian lover (a man named Eivind Adler Christensen) to seek the kaiser's help in arming the Irish against Britain. Upon his return to Ireland, in April 1916, he was captured, imprisoned, stripped of his knighthood and hanged as a traitor in Pentonville Prison in London. Casement's fate was sealed not only by his collaboration with the enemy but by the release, to certain influential people, of lurid excerpts from his "black diaries" - books attributed to him that contained descriptions of various homosexual encounters, real and (perhaps, in Vargas Llosa's view) imagined. In 1916, in wartime, no clemency was possible for a man whose record bore the double blots of treason and homosexuality. In the 1930s, William Butler Yeats, whom Casement admired for his role in reviving Irish lore, history and tradition, wrote a poem in his defense ("What gave that roar of mockery,/That roar in the sea's roar?/The ghost of Roger Casement/Is beating on the door"), but it wasn't until the 1960s that Casement's remains were taken from London to Dublin for a proper funeral. Now, nearly a century after Casement's execution, Vargas Llosa has attempted to appease his uneasy ghost, assembling a case for his reprieve. Vargas Llosa had been a published fiction writer for more than 50 years when this novel appeared in Spanish in November 2010. The previous month, the Swedish Academy had declared him the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that, in the opinion of many readers, was long overdue. But had this book appeared before October, it might have seemed that the Nobel category Vargas Llosa was courting wasn't "Literature" but "Peace." "The Dream of the Celt," felicitously and faithfully translated by Edith Grossman, feels anomalous when contrasted with the rest of Vargas Llosa's vast, pliable oeuvre; it's unusually straightforward and information-packed. The action is presented in long, chronological flashbacks, which Casement recalls from the prison where he awaits the hangman's noose, shunned by most of his powerful friends. Organized by biographical milestones and itineraries, the novel encyclopedically recapitulates Casement's observations of "indescribable cruelties" (though Vargas Llosa describes them quite effectively) on two continents, brought about by men "driven by greed and base instincts in a lawless world." Only rarely does a flight of fancy enter the ledger, as when Casement and his companions notice the "variety, size and beauty" of the butterflies in the Peruvian Amazon, which "seemed to dazzle the air with delicate notes, a compensation for the moral ugliness they discovered at every turn, as if there were no end to wickedness, greed and pain in this unfortunate land." Very occasionally, Casement is permitted a spicy reverie, as when he delights in the erotic vision of a muscular Angolan porter wearing a "light piece of cloth" around his hips that "opened and offered a glimpse of his sex." Vargas Llosa has two chief modes of writing: serious politico-historical novels like "The Feast of the Goat" and "The War of the End of the World" and sensual picaresques like "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" and "The Bad Girl." The two modes often intertwine, each creeping lushly into the other: humor and wit leaven the more political novels, while acute social observations deepen the lighter ones. In this instance, however, Vargas Llosa's revulsion at Casement's accounts of the horrors to be found in Congo and Amazonia, as well as his respect for the consul's role in exposing them, may have sapped his desire to take many liberties in reconceiving Casement's personal history. How did Casement's closeted yet (so it would seem) hotly pursued homosexuality shape his identity? Vargas Llosa doesn't speculate, reserving most of his thoughts on the question for his epilogue, as if to deliberately avoid what he calls the "novelesque." Instead, he restricts himself to underscoring the ever-present dangers of the abuse of power. IT'S easy to share Vargas Llosa's enthusiasm for Casement as he retraces the man's daring and difficult journeys through Africa and South America. But when he follows Casement on the third and final leg of his life's voyage, traveling to Germany to woo the kaiser on behalf of Irish rebels, he loses his way - as, indeed, did Casement. It may be true, as Vargas Llosa writes, that in Congo Casement learned the "great lie of colonialism" and began to feel "like the citizen of a country occupied and exploited by the Empire that had bled and weakened Ireland." And Casement's charge that if the "methods of colonization in Europe are more refined," they are "no less cruel" will find its supporters. It may not have been necessary, however, to defend all of Casement's decisions in order to applaud his great and wrongly overlooked contribution to the quest for human dignity. A man doesn't need to be heroic in everything he does in order to be a hero in his time. Nearly a century after Casement was executed in London for treason, Mario Vargas Llosa attempts to appease his uneasy ghost. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. The Nobel Prize laureate turns to the early 20th-century Irish rebel Roger Casement's insurrection and execution in a saga typical of the author's renowned storytelling style. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
A Nobel Prize for Literature winner (in 2010) and one-time Peruvian presidential candidate, Vargas Llosa chronicles the life of Roger Casement, an Irish patriot and human rights activist, or "specialist in atrocities," who was executed by the British in 1916 after the Easter Rising, which heralded the beginning of Irish independence. This is a meticulously researched book about a deeply complex man; Vargas Llosa's admirable powers as a writer of fiction are apparent when he slows the pace of the narrative to allow access to Casement's thoughts as he languishes in prison, waiting to hear whether his stay of execution has been granted. Vargas Llosa (The Bad Girl) is at his best writing as a novelist rather than biographer, but the unnecessarily complex narrative structure in which Casement's life story unfolds at a galloping pace achieves neither the best of biography nor the best of fiction. Readers will wish that the book was either one or the other. Agent: The Carmen Balcells Agency. (June 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The Peruvian Nobel laureate is an aggressive yet elegant writer, unafraid of confronting big social and political issues and complex historical figures and corralling these potent forces into wide-screen novels that never fail to leave readers slammed against the wall in awe and admiration. In his new novel, he has taken from the pages of history a quiet, sober, reflective Irishman in the British diplomatic service. But through his great humanitarian work, Roger Casement spoke loudly about colonial abuse of native peoples in the Congo and Peru, for which he was knighted by the British king in 1911. Startlingly, five years later, he was executed for treason by the same king's government. This seeming disparity, the transition from hero to criminal, is the great drama of Casement's life, rendered by Vargas Llosa with a wondrous mixture of factual accuracy and responsible imagining. Casement's evolution from believing in the colonial system to abhorring it, and then carrying over his newfound and profound hatred of oppression to an intense and ultimately fatal bid to wrest Ireland's home rule from Britain, is a trajectory the author follows with a dynamic richness of detail that leaves the novel a sublime example of historical fiction of the highest order and of literature in its maximum effectiveness. High-Demand Back Story: Prepub buzz announces this as one of the South American master's finest efforts, and literary fiction readers will want to read and discuss.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
Summary

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A subtle and enlightening novel about a neglected human rights pioneer by the Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa


In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world--especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon--but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and execution. Ultimately, the scandals surrounding Casement's trial and eventual hanging tainted his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights work wasn't fully reexamined until the 1960s.

In The Dream of the Celt , Mario Vargas Llosa, who has long been regarded as one of Latin America's most vibrant, provocative, and necessary literary voices--a fact confirmed when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010--brings this complex character to life as no other writer can. A masterful work, sharply translated by Edith Grossman, The Dream of the Celt tackles a controversial man whose story has long been neglected, and, in so doing, pushes at the boundaries of the historical novel.

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