And thereby hangs a tale

The heart sinks when news breaks that an already distinguished novelist is trying his or her hand at the Irish revolution. The track record is uninspiring. Anthony Trollope lived many years in Ireland and knew senior nationalist leaders like Isaac Butt; even so, The Land Leaguers (1882) is very disappointing. Iris Murdoch had deep roots in the Northern Irish middle class; despite, or because, of this The Red and the Green (1965) is again a failure by the standards of middle-period Murdoch. Raymond Queneau’s sado-erotic satire on the Easter Rising, We Always Treat Women Too Well (1947), was perhaps unfairly excluded from the official Gallimard edition of Queneau’s oeuvre until 1962. George V. Higgins, described by Grey Gowrie as the ‘Balzac of New England’, achieves a distinctly sub-Balzacian level with his The Patriot Game (1982).

How then does Mario Vargas Llosa fare with his tricky project? Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916) gives the novelist plenty to work with; indeed, his numerous biographers have trawled widely to provide raw material for a novelist. Raised and educated in Protestant north Antrim — the heartland of modern Paisleyism — Casement entered the British foreign service in 1892. He earned an international reputation for his reports (commissioned by the Foreign Office) on atrocities committed by European employers in the Belgian Congo and later in Putomayo, South America. The US government of President Taft was unimpressed by the Putamayo report. J.V. Bryce, our ambassador in Washington, and like Casement an Antrim man, seized the opportunity to inflict Casement on Taft at a dinner party: the tall Celt, ‘haggard and livid from the swamps, fixed with his glittering eyes the rubicund Anglo-
Saxon.’ H.A.L. Fisher concluded: ‘It was like a black snake fascinating a wombat.’ For this and other services, Casement was awarded a knighthood before retiring from the service in 1913.