The story begins in Congo in 1903 and ends in a London prison on a morning in 1916. It is the adventure of a lifetime of a legend: the Irishman Roger Casement. Hero and traitor, moral and immoral, Casement was one of the first Europeans to denounce the horror of colonization.
What he saw during his two journeys, to the Belgian Congo and the Amazon of South America, marked Casement forever, prompting him to change course, in this case spiritually and politically, with disastrous results. Thus, he came face to face with the England he admired and actively committed himself to the cause of Irish nationalism.
But even in his personal life, Casement was a complex personality: the publication of excerpts from questionable diaries brought to light scandalous sexual escapades, which caused the disdain of many of his compatriots.
A major novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, the first he wrote after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, describes an existential adventure in which the darkness of the human soul appears in its purest and, consequently, its dirtiest form.
