I reported a rubber factlet from this fictionalised biography of Roger Casement (don't recall whether we got around to stripping him of his 'sir', awarded for services to humanity or some such) by Mario Vargas Llosa on 16th September and I have now finished reading it.
As I have explained previously (see, for example, October 19th 2009), I do not approve of mixing fact with fiction, although when I come to think about it, perhaps it is not so bad after all: it does bring things to life in a way that a non-fiction account does not often manage. But one is putting a lot of trust in the author: are the impressions that one comes away with the right ones? Has far too much which is actually missing been guessed? What about some references so that one can check things which seem a bit odd or improbable? In this case, I am sure that I now know a lot more about Roger Casement and his various causes than I did before, but I still worry about how much of it has been made up.
For example, I did not know that some of the warders in English prisons in 1915 or so were called sheriffs. Nor did I think that people were executed on a scaffold which the victim had to climb up onto, erected in the courtyard of Pentonville Prison. I thought that we had indoor execution chambers adjoining condemned cells, as short a walk as could be managed.
Certainly an easy enough read. Casement's doings in the Congo, in the Amazon and in the Irish movement in the run up to independence make a good story and it is good to be reminded of the bad things which were being done in his day. Not least of the blocking of Irish independence by a bunch of Tory peers, at a time when the Commons and I would think the country at large were for it. A bunch of Tory peers who have given us all a bad name; all Brits are bad to the hard core Irish nationalist - who is apt to forget that most of us started out on his side, before he took to terrorism.
Good also to be told about how some indiginents got squashed in the squabbles between Columbia and Peru over who owned what bit of the Amazon basin. How easily apparently civilised Europeans can slip into condoning dreadful treatment of indiginents, if not worse. How the Irish Nationalists got a bit silly about the ancient Irish. And how some of them thought at the time of the first war that they might have got a better deal from the Kaiser than from Lloyd George - as at the time of the second some of them thought that they might have got a better deal from Hitler than from Churchill. A naivety they shared with sundry peoples in east Asia who thought that the Japanese might give them a better deal than the Europeans. How much suffering might have been avoided if we had moved a bit faster on giving all these people their independence.
Lastly, I was rather taken with the theory Llosa advances that the famous Casement diaries, diaries which perhaps cost him his clemency, were in part, if not largely, made up. Fantasies which were written down rather than acted out. Trivial and largely innocent encounters puffed up into major athletic events.
Not so taken with the bit where Casement's body was subject, after his execution, to the indignity of an intimate examination to ascertain the extent of his unnatural activities. I wonder if we really were up to that sort of thing?
PS: glad I don't live in a seriously hot country. Living in our cool wet one might have its downsides, but reading about the Congo and the Amazon there are clearly a lot of upsides. Plus I do not care for hot; give me cool every time.
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