Prospero

The Dream of the Celt. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 404 pages; $27. Faber and Faber; £18.99

IN 1884 Roger Casement, an ascetic young Ulsterman, joined an expedition up the Congo river led by Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born American explorer, believing that commerce, Christianity and colonialism would emancipate the dark continent. By the time he left Africa 20 years later, Casement had emerged as the leading figure in an international campaign to denounce the abuses committed by the Congo’s Belgian colonisers. As British consul, he published a report that detailed how the African population were beaten and mutilated to force them to supply rubber for export to Europe.

When reports reached London that the rubber boom had prompted a similar reign of terror against the indigenous population in Putumayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, the British foreign secretary sent Casement to investigate, with the words: “You’re a specialist in atrocities. You can’t say no.” He found that the cruelty of overseers who forced indentured labourers to continue working until they had paid off their debts had annihilated three-quarters of the Indian population. His report prompted the collapse of the Peruvian Amazon Company, the London-registered company responsible. Casement was knighted, and the Times hailed him as “a great humanitarian”.

A passionate man of complex character, Casement is a tailor-made protagonist for Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who won the Nobel prize in literature in 2010. “The Dream of the Celt” blends fact and fiction; it is at once a meticulously researched fictional biography and a clever psychological novel.

Casement’s fame quickly turned to notoriety. Only a few years after his lauded success in Peru he was hanged in Pentonville prison as a traitor. Having transferred his thirst for justice to the fight for Irish independence, he sought German military support for the cause during the first world war. But many Irish nationalists opposed this stance, leading him to be ostracised by several of his friends, such as Joseph Conrad. Casement was caught in 1916 on an Irish beach during a foiled attempt to land 20,000 German rifles. His British captors sought to further besmirch his name by circulating diaries in which he detailed homosexual encounters with young men on several continents.

This is ripe material. The African segment of the book will be familiar to readers of “King Leopold’s Ghost”, Adam Hochschild’s remarkable history of the rape of the Belgian Congo. Some of the dialogue is stilted by the need to convey information but Mr Vargas Llosa is blessed with extraordinary powers of description and imagination, the reader is quickly engrossed by Casement’s story. The strongest passages are when the author skilfully interweaves scenes in Pentonville prison with details of Casement’s earlier life to trace the evolution of Casement’s consciousness. Like many good novels, “The Dream of the Celt” is a moral tale. It is about the choice between denial or denunciation in the face of evil, and the fine line between activism and fanaticism. That makes an old story strikingly contemporary.