Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, The Dream of the Celt [Faber & Faber, 2012], delves into the history of the colonisation of the Congo and Amazonia as well as the biography of Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist. Llosa questions the very validity of history many times in the novel. Most history, implies the novelist, is a “more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals, advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipated or experienced by the protagonists” (109-110). A historical novel may be more accurate than documented history because the novelist looks at the events from a wider and deeper perspective than a historian. For example, Sir Henry Stanley is portrayed in history as the heroic founder of the
Cerebrate and Celebrate