Roger Casement lived a life that defied division: an imperial commander who exposed imperial atrocities; a former United Kingdom diplomat who helped Germany in the Irish war of independence; a closeted gay man who left detailed accounts of his sexual adventures; a state hero convicted of plotting against the crown.
TE Lawrence (“of Arabia”), himself ignorant of the hypocrisy of British rule and the problems of illicit sex, called Casement “a broken archangel”. Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s Ireland writer, preserves some of those poems in this deeply researched and fascinating account of Casement’s role in the founding of the Irish state.
Most of the action in A Rebel and Traitor takes place between 1914 and 1916. At the beginning of this period, Casement – still respected in London as a recently retired representative of the British diplomatic service – gives evidence to a royal commission in 1914 on the regulation of the overseas service. Finally, he is awaiting sentencing for the coup in Pentonville prison.
In between, the former ambassador traveled to the US to rally support for the Irish cause; to Germany, to raise an army to fight the British; to Ireland before the Easter Rising; and I returned to London, this time as a prisoner.
Casement inherited, in Carroll’s words, a “broken identity” as the child of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother who had both died by the time he was 12. He was polite and tireless and, in the words of the man who killed him, “the bravest man fell in my unfortunate position to kill him”.
A depressed activist who felt lonely even among his friends, he joined the colonial service at the end of the 19th century and served in Africa, where he was so shocked by the plight of the rubber workers in the Belgian Congo that he worked hard to expose their exploitation. His experiences there, as well as in South Africa during the Boer war, were to turn him strongly against colonialism, and he left power in 1913.
Casement’s opponent was Reginald “Blinker” Hall, an arrogant and confused-faced naval officer who headed the British embassy’s intelligence service and, with his access to deleted telegrams between Germany and the US, tracked Irish attempts to enlist Berlin in favor of Irish independence. Next to these two is a group of nationalists, socialists, imperialists, rulers, rural police, desperate agricultural workers and others.
Carroll’s achievement is to set this story of tragic, dramatic and heroic revolution within the wider context of the first world war without allowing it to be overshadowed by the carnage anywhere. The commander of the U-boat that took Casement to Ireland, a few months earlier, sank the Lusitania and thereby killed more than 1,000 people – but the focus is on a small war within a world war.
In normal times, Casement might end up lecturing at Hyde Park Corner or writing articles for niche publications. However, at the height of the world war, when a thousand young men were being sent to their deaths and governments were taking risks they could not imagine, he won an audience among British opponents, and the opportunity to change the fate of his nation.
Casement was recaptured shortly after his return to Ireland, so his attempt to lead his people to freedom was – to put it bluntly – a failure. However, along with a similar Abortion Act in Dublin, it helped to create an atmosphere of opposition that led to open war and the once-impossible dream of an Irish state.
By the end of the book, I found myself wishing it had gone on to analyze the reasons why British rule ultimately failed in the years following Casement’s assassination, and to describe in detail the Irish leaders of the time. However, that’s not what Carroll is here to do, and he succeeds in his primary task of creating a complex character, giving him credit for his strengths but not hiding his flaws, especially his desire to have sex with the young and vulnerable.
There have been attempts to film Casement’s life in the past – a 1934 Hollywood drama even contemplated a tearful breakup with a blonde girlfriend – and I wouldn’t be surprised if a novelist read the book and decided to have another go. There would certainly be a lot of competition for the chance to play the role of this mysterious, remarkable, impossible man.
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