Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004
The Tragedy of Roger Casement
By Colm Tóibín
Roger Casement: The Black Diaries
by Jeffrey Dudgeon
Belfast: Belfast Press, 659 pp., £25.00
Sir Roger Casement's Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents
by Angus Mitchell
Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 816 pp., £75.00
The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement's Congo Report and 1903 Diary
edited by Séamus Ó Síocháin and Michael O'Sullivan
Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 366 pp., $74.95; $34.95 (paper)
Roger Casement in Death, or Haunting the Free State
by W.J. McCormack
Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 240 pp., $54.95; $27.95 (paper)(distributed in the US by Dufour Editions)
In The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald finds himself in an English seaside town falling asleep during a BBC documentary about the life of the Irishman Roger Casement, who was executed by the British in August 1916 for high treason. Afterward, when Sebald, intrigued by his own vague and twilit memories of the program, sets about finding out what he can about Casement, his imagination is fired by the relationship between Casement and Joseph Conrad, who first met each other in the Congo in either 1889 or 1890, when Casement, then in his mid-twenties, was working for the Congo Railway Company. For a number of weeks the two men shared a room. Conrad found inspiration at that time for Heart of Darkness; Casement was beginning on the road toward becoming a hero, a martyr, and a traitor.
Review, 6096 words
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