The Dream of the Celt.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick
• Position: Book review

The Dream of the Celt (El sueño del celta) the latest novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature, is about Roger Casement's colorful life as martyr, traitor, and early defender of human rights. The book was published in Spanish in November but will not be available in English until early 2012.

Vargas Llosa is no stranger to mixing fact and fiction. The Dream of the Celt , which takes its title from a line in one of Casement's own poems, fits well into the tradition of Vargas Llosa's major novels--The War of the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat .

It is broad in scope, international in its context, preoccupied with political issues, and engages the reader in a careful and minute dissection of the major character.

Particularly interesting is Vargas Llosa's interpretation of Casement's experiences in South America, where he was involved in humanitarian campaigning against abuses of the indigenous workers in the Peruvian Amazon by the rubber companies. "Roger Casement is one of the first Europeans who had a clear awareness of what colonialism was and one of the first to denounce its abuses," writes Vargas Llosa. "He was a pioneer. He was one of the first Europeans who truly understood what colonialism meant for Africa, for the Third World and one of the first to attack the mythology built around the idea of colonialism as an instrument of civilization."

Vargas Llosa's novel covers Casement as British consul in the Congo, where he wrote a report on the atrocities he witnessed there. It then sharpens the focus a few years later, when the British government sent him to investigate the situation of Indians working in the extraction of rubber in the Amazon in the region of Putumayo, on the border between Colombia and Peru. Casement's experiences in Peru and the Congo had a profound influence on the development of his Irish nationalism because he came to associate the British...