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Summary
Summary
Following her New York Times Editor's Choice collection of short stories Tales of the New World , historical fiction master Sabina Murray returns with an epic and bold novel of friendship and betrayal set across four continents and a 40-year time span
In prose that is darkly humorous and alive with detail, Valiant Gentlemen reimagines the lives and intimate friendships of humanitarian and Irish patriot Roger Casement; his closest friend, Herbert Ward; and Ward's extraordinary wife, the Argentinian-American heiress Sarita Sanford. Valiant Gentlemen takes the reader on an intimate journey, from Ward and Casement's misadventurous youth in the Congo--where, among other things, they bore witness to an Irish whiskey heir's taste for cannibalism--to Ward's marriage to Sarita and their flourishing family life in France, to Casement's covert homosexuality and enduring nomadic lifestyle floating between his work across the African continent and involvement in Irish politics. When World War I breaks out, Casement and Ward's longstanding political differences finally come to a head and when Ward and his teenage sons leave to fight on the frontlines for England, Casement begins to work alongside the Germans to help free Ireland from British rule. What results is tragic and riveting, as both men are forced to confront notions of love and betrayal in the face of the vastly different tracks their lives have taken.
Reminiscent of the work of Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje, Valiant Gentlemen is a uniquely human account of some of early 20th century's larger historical figures from a "ravishing" ( O Magazine ) and "brilliant" ( The Boston Globe ) voice in fiction today.
Author Notes
She grew up in Austrialia & the Philippines. A former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas & Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, she is the author of the novel Slow Burn. She has also written a screenplay titled Beautiful Country.She is the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Brimming with exquisite detail and clever humor, PEN/Faulkner winner Murray's wondrously written historical novel ferries a vivid cast of characters across continents and decades, from the sweltering jungles of 19th-century Africa to cosmopolitan Paris in the wake of World War I. Here the close-knit avatars of history are Roger Casement, an Irish revolutionary, and Herbert Ward, a former circus performer turned devoted husband and father. Early chapters follow the two friends into cannibalistic villages and Manhattan's earliest gay bars, along the Continental Railroad and speaking tours of the West Coast, eventually to Ward's marriage to Sarita Sanford, a headstrong Argentinian-American heiress. The cracks in the central friendship fissure at the advent of the Great War, with Ward fighting alongside his son for England, Casement lending his talents to the Germans, who promise to free Ireland from British control. As in Tales of the New World and The Caprices, the author maintains an impressive balance of historical accuracy and dramatic momentum, crafting a stellar fiction that shows how the grand course of history can be shaped by the smallest disagreements between friends. Agent: Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Murray (Forgery, 2007) returns to historical fiction with this account of the 40-year friendship of writer and sculptor Herbert Ward and Irish patriot Roger Casement. The two meet in 1886 as young men working and gallivanting in the Congo. Ward uses this experience as inspiration for his artistic pursuits, but Casement, haunted by the treatment of the tribal people, turns to a life of humanitarianism, while also fighting for Irish independence. They go their separate ways, Ward marrying Argentinian-American heiress Sarita Sanford, who proves to be a scene-stealer, and Casement gets further involved in politics heading into WWI. They remain friends until political differences lead to betrayal and tragedy. Murray has clearly done her homework and aptly shows not only the larger-than-life personalities of her protagonists but also their quieter, interior lives. Historical-fiction fans will be captivated by this highly readable account of British colonialism and political intrigue couched in the very personal story of the friendship of two remarkable men.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THIS YEAR IS the centenary of the execution of Sir Roger Casement. Dublin-born and raised as a Protestant, mainly in England, this career diplomat and zealous humanitarian is today remembered as much for his advocacy on behalf of the exploited peoples of the Belgian Congo and Amazonia (it was his efforts on behalf of Amazonian natives that earned him his knighthood) as for the improbable devotion to the cause of Irish independence that led him, during World War I, to help orchestrate an ill-fated and ill-planned scheme to win German support - and buy German arms - for the Easter Rebellion. Arrested in Ireland and transported back to England in 1916, Casement was charged with high treason, imprisoned in the Tower of London and hanged at Pentonville Prison, after a campaign organized by his friends failed to win him clemency. As historians and biographers have noted, a major factor in the turn of opinion against Casement was the exposure of the socalled Black Diaries, notebooks in which he recorded, in often explicit language, his sexual experiences with other men. Casement's life is exactly the sort to pique a writer's imagination, and indeed, in 2010 the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa made him the hero of a novel, "The Dream of the Celt," of which Liesl Schillinger wrote in these pages: "Vargas Llosa's revulsion at Casement's accounts of the horrors to be found in Congo and Amazonia, as well as his respect for the consul's role in exposing them, may have sapped his desire to take many liberties in reconceiving Casement's personal history." In particular, Vargas Llosa gave short shrift to Casement's love affairs, with the result that "The Dream of the Celt" reads less like a work of fully imagined fiction than a political biography in narrative form - expository, dry, oddly lifeless. The same, I'm pleased to report, can't be said of Sabina Murray's "Valiant Gentlemen," a novel as vigorous, audacious and unpredictable as Casement himself. Whereas Vargas Llosa used his protagonist's imprisonment as a frame for an overview of his life, Murray, the author of several other novels and the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning story collection "The Caprices," widens the narrative landscape by giving prominence to two figures usually relegated to the margins of works on Casement: the British sculptor Herbert Ward, Casement's closest friend from his Congo days, and Ward's wife, the American-born and Argentinian-raised heiress Sarita Sanford. The liberty that Murray takes - I would call it a leap of faith - is to make Ward, from the novel's first paragraph, Casement's unrequited great love, a fact of which Ward remains obtusely unaware but that Sarita (a woman on whom, to borrow Henry James's famous phrase, nothing is lost) comes to recognize and accept. Whereas Vargas Llosa tells one man's life story, Murray tells the far more dynamic story of two men and a woman whose friendship endures for nearly 30 years, only to be shattered when they find themselves on opposite sides in the war. "Valiant Gentlemen" opens in September 1886 in Congo. Casement and Ward are both "company men," newly recruited to participate in the Sanford Exploring Expedition and thereby relieved of the onus of being "employed by King Leopold of Belgium." Both still in their early 20s, Casement and Ward find common cause in their shared outrage at the brutalities suffered by the Congolese at the hands of their Belgian overlords. Common cause, in turn, leads to common ground (both aspire to be writers), common ground to friendship, and friendship, for Casement, to a misty-eyed amour fou that will long outlast Ward's youthful handsomeness. In Africa, Murray tells us, Ward "punctuates" Casement's days: "Ward in the morning by the edge of the water in his breeches; Ward's signature high-noon squint; Ward's rangy walk as he patrols the length of the column." Nor is this a passing infatuation. Almost 14 years later, waiting to meet Ward in a shabby London hotel, Casement is surprised to find himself "nervous, his heart uneasy in his chest....He can feel that soaring, involuntary hope as he anticipates Ward's company, can predict the ensuing low spirits when Ward leaves." As Murray portrays him, Casement "is built of a tough exterior and a tender middle, his constitution only remarkable by the extent to which his inner life is kept secret." That inner life encompasses not just love affairs - most notably with a Norwegian sailor, Adler Christensen, and forays into the dim and dangerous homosexual subculture of the late 19 th century - but an allegiance to the Irish cause that baffles Ward, whose obliviousness to Casement's feelings for him goes hand in hand with his John Bullish denigration of Casement's Irishness, which he sees as "some degraded form of Englishness." Why should the cause of Home Rule so exercise Casement, given that Casement himself is, as Ward observes, "practically English" and "not even Catholic"? This question is the tuning fork to which Murray's novel vibrates. Her Casement is a man driven to action by beliefs so contradictory and turbulent as to split him into the multiplicity of selves he sees while dressing after a liaison at a Turkish bath in London: "This English self that buttons his shirt, this Irish self that puts on the coat, the hat, that picks up gloves and cane. And thus returned to the sidewalk, that self that should pick its steps back and back, walk in reverse - as time seems to wind backward to him - winding back to the time when none of it ever happened." As Murray notes in an afterword, the title "Valiant Gentlemen" is a nod to Sarita Sanford Ward's memoir of her husband, "A Valiant Gentleman." The pluralization is key, in that it underscores the extent to which the dichotomy of valor and cowardice invests Murray's narrative with shape and momentum. "If you don't have a choice, it's not courage, and if you do, it's no different than stupidity," Adler Christensen, Casement's lover and eventual betrayer, observes late in the novel, a remark that resonates ironically when, later still, Casement quotes from a eulogy delivered by the Fenian Padraig Pearse at the funeral of one of his men: "Enough to know that the valiant soldier of Ireland is dead, that the unconquered spirit is free." If courage is no different from stupidity, then who, in this vital and uneasy novel, is the truly valiant gentleman? Is it Casement, whose well-intentioned if shortsighted effort to forge an alliance with the Germans fails so miserably? Is it Ward, whose blind patriotism drives him to self-destruction on the battlefields of France? Or is it the fierce and magnanimous Sarita, as unyielding in her loyalties as she is unsparing in her condemnations? Certainly Sarita is the novel's lodestar, the force, as Ward puts it, that keeps "the planets in rotation." Seeing Casement for what will prove to be the last time, Sarita experiences an "anxiety that all will not be well, that heartsick contraction that makes her think of the uncertain future with respect and fatalism and only the faith that it's likely that she, at least, will survive, as that is what she's good at." Survive she does - but to what end? "The future may always be uncertain," her husband reflects in September 1914, "but paradoxically, the future holds an irrefutable certainty: We know that we don't know what will happen. This grim absurdity diminishes all chatter." What it does not diminish is the potency of a novel that, although set a hundred years ago, denies the reader the consolation of centennial retrospection, and in so doing translates the past into a present as immediate as it is unnerving. As Murray herself puts it: "The prime narrator - actual event - does not exist and we must turn the pages blindly." The dichotomy of valor and cowardice invests Murray's novel with shape and momentum. DAVID LEAVITT'S most recent novel is "The Two Hotel Francforts" He teaches at the University of Florida.
Kirkus Review
A long yarn recounting the life of Irish revolutionary Roger Casement and real-life best friend Herbert Ward, the British writer and artist.It wont be a spoiler to note that Casement was executed for treason by the British government, having traveled to Germany during World War I to solicit help for the cause of Irish independence. Did personal motivations underlie his devotion to that cause, perhaps connected to his guarded but evident homosexuality? (Someone was saying at dinner that youre like Wolf Tone, one interlocutor says. Maybe he liked boys?) Certainly, Murray (Tales of the New World, 2011, etc.) recounts, Casement's friendship with Ward was unusually deep; in a closing moment, Ward finds a photograph that Casement has folded in half to exclude two other figures, so that it appeared that they had been photographed as a couple. But there is another love at play once Ward and Casement emerge from their career-defining adventures in the wilds of Africa: Sarita Sanford, a fetching heiress savvy enough to know that taking up with Ward is a fiscal risk that will pay off in a loss of innocenceto which she appends the dismissive thought, How romantic. Though the novel is populated with other characters, the essence of the story is the triangle formed by Sanford, Ward, and Casement; of the three, Sanford is the most interesting. Murray casts inevitable tragedy (She feels a gripa chilland wonders why of all things shes feeling this: the pull of grief), but while she has a good eye for character, some of the energy of the story melts away in pointless chatter. The storyline could stand some tightening, too, though it resolves nicely. Not at all bad, but given that Mario Vargas Llosa covered much of the same ground in his superior 2010 novel, The Dream of the Celt, Murrays version of the Casement story seems superfluous. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This bold historical novel tells the story of Irish-born Roger Casement (1864-1916), hanged by the British as a traitor in 1916 for something it's not at all clear he actually did or wanted done. Casement and Englishman Herbert Ward meet in the Congo in 1886. Both are men of talent and ambition but limited means. Later, Ward marries Argentinian American heiress Sarita Sanford, who knows Casement is gay but believes he's good for Ward. The three stay close for 30 years. Then war looms, and their friendship frays over Casement's involvement in the Irish independence movement. Ward sees Casement's espousal of Germany as betrayal. When Casement is brought to trial for treason, his friend refuses to console him. This is a novel of warring selves: Casement's public vs. private face, Irish against English self, the subterfuges and compromises in Sanford's and Ward's marriage, and-a particularly brilliant episode-Casement's meeting with a secretive Joseph Conrad at a remote Congo outpost. Verdict Murray (creative writing, Univ. Mass. Amherst; Tales of the New World) has written an affecting novel about the unraveling of friendship under the buffetings of history. It's wise enough and good enough to put on the shelf next to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/16; five-city tour.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.