Roland Philipps’s Broken Archangel charts the rise and fall of Roger Casement, a naive Irish hero

History

Roger Casement was 'a force for good'. Photo: Getty

Pat Carty

There’s a passing mention of Roger Casement in the Cyclops chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. “Casement, says the citizen. He’s an Irishman.” It’s no accident that this is where the put-upon Leopold Bloom speaks out in the face of a bigoted onslaught.

“Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women,” Bloom asserts. “It’s the very opposite of that that is really life” – by which he means love.