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.