In Irish historical and literary studies there has been an enduring anxiety about Roger Casement, his life, his death and his afterlife. Alison Garden, in her contribution to what can be called Casement studies, uses the language of ghosts and hauntings to reflect an unfinished history. Garden, in The literary afterlives of Roger Casement, situates her study, carefully, within ‘afterlives’ or memory studies and seeks to engage with Casement's literary, cultural, artistic and transnational legacies. Using the perspective of afterlives she follows on from the pioneering work of Lucy McDermid, Brian Lewis and Eóin Flannery, all of whom have published on Casement's afterlives. These afterlives often serve to ‘disrupt neat national canons’, haunt literary and cultural texts, as all the while, Casement, the man, particularly the queer man, continues to disrupt and cause anxiety in the neat, linear, uncomplicated, heteronormative commemorative decade.

The centenary commemorations of the 1916 Rising in 2016 saw an ‘astonishing number of events’ which placed Roger Casement centre stage ― astonishing because Casement was arrested on Good Friday 1916 at Banna Strand in County Kerry and played no part whatsoever in the actual fighting. These state, local, artistic, and cultural centenary commemorations indicate the exceptionally enduring interest in the man and his legacies. There are many reasons to see Casement as an important figure, both inside and outside of Irish revolutionary histories. At the state centenary commemoration in Banna Strand, President Michael D. Higgins noted that the occasion ‘was about taking pride in Casement's idealism, his exposure of exploitation by empires and his commitment to the cause of freedom in Ireland and abroad’. This reflects the most enduring public imagining of Casement, the plucky, engaged, brave human rights defender, who exposed the savageries of empire in the Congo, the Amazon and indeed the impact of those savageries in his native Ireland. However, Casement was more complicated than this single image, more human in his strengths and frailties, in his politics and in his private life.

Garden engages with the complexities of these afterlives of Casement in literary, cultural and memory studies; her Casement is an ‘enduring ghost’. Of particular interest is her discussion, in chapter two, of the infamous black diaries, which contain explicit accounts of his homosexual encounters, mostly with younger men. As the debates on their authenticity fade from centre stage, the challenges posed by the homophobia which greeted their reception, and more problematically, the quasi-sexual depiction of children, as well as the erotic fixation of racial difference, can now be unpacked, as Garden does so carefully and superbly here. She retains the focus on the diaries as articulating a ‘white gaze’, detailed in her critique of Mario Vargas Llosa's unsatisfactory depiction of Casement in The dream of the Celt (2012). Vargas Llosa's treatment of the diaries is couched in the language of queer shame and a racialised, imperial erotic, which deprives, as Garden writes, ‘the diaries of their erotic energy … while unimaginatively and unhelpfully blurring the line between truth and fantasy’.

Casement's relationships with younger men and boys remain problematic, as discussed here. These complexities are seen in his relationship with the writer Arthur Conan Doyle; both men shared an Irish heritage and complex relationship with ‘imperialism, colonialism and Irish politics’, as well as a ‘complex intellectual relationship’. Casement's interactions with Omarino, aged about ten years, and Ricudo, who was about nineteen ― two boys he ‘brought’ home from the Amazon in 1911 ― are discussed. The boys were exhibited, photographed and painted. Often overlooked, this episode is of vital importance in complicating the Casement's engagement with the peoples of the Amazon ― the human rights defender as fore fronted in the state commemoration in 2016 certainly did exist, but so too did the man who was driven both by a humanitarian empathy and, equally, an imperial paternalism. Garden engages well with what she terms the ‘complex, contradictory and messy ideas’ Casement held about indigenous peoples. In a fascinating connection to home, Patrick Pearse wrote to Casement about taking Omarino ‘the young barbarian’ as he called him, into his school, St Enda's, to receive an education.

A queer Pearse, albeit a much-disputed idea, allows Garden to use this dialogue between himself and Casement to establish a space to consider same sex desire between men and Irish nationalism. Jamie O'Neill's novel, At swim, two boys, set in 1915 and 1916, depicting the sexual and nationalist awakening of two boys, Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle, is haunted by the ‘queer triumvirate’ ― Pearse, Casement and Oscar Wilde. Garden includes here a fascinating discussion on the character of Eva MacMurrough, who is an amalgam of many of the revolutionary women who knew, loved or supported Casement ― scholars have argued about whether she is modelled on Lady Gregory, Countess Markievicz, Maud Gonne, Eva Gore Booth or his long-time friend, cultural nationalist, Ada McNeill. So many of these women were his supporters and defenders during his 1916 trial and were among those whose writings initially created the Casement of memory and history, eulogising him as a fallen hero, firmly establishing his place in the pantheon of Irish martyrs, alongside Pearse. Ultimately, however, O'Neill's book is about queer love and nationalism, a space which established, as Garden notes, ‘a vision of Ireland that excludes Eva and all women’. It is perhaps depressing that a work such as At swim, which sought to recover queer stories and radical politics, mutes those of radical, and indeed, in the case of Eva Gore Booth, queer women ― it is a ‘masculine homo-nationalism that writes women out of the Irish national story’.

Many of the artistic works produced in 2016 which centred on Casement sought to unpack his queerness. Among the many were Fearghus Ó Conchúir's I'm Roger Casement, a dance project filmed on Banna beach where Casement's human rights work was viewed through the lens of solidarity, while his homosexuality was seen through his words in the diaries and the homophobic reposes they have elicited since becoming public during this trial in 1916. And so lingers the endless fascination with Casement's life, legacies and afterlives. Does Garden get to the heart of Casement – his life, his work, his sexuality, his patriotism, his trial, his death and its meanings in history and memory? Perhaps the last word should be left to the author of this fascinating study. A queer past, like Casement's, will, of necessity, remain incomplete. As with all queer pasts the archive remains somewhat out of reach, incomplete, hidden, silenced and disputed; Casement will, as Garden rightfully notes, ‘continue to haunt us’, but this work makes his haunting less of a ghostly white on white text, and is a worthy addition to Casement studies.