To
sum this up in short, there are books, and then there are Books. This is one of
the latter. When I was first presented with Heart
of Darkness, I couldn’t help but marvel at how short it was; barely a
hundred pages. After all, I’m still under the notion that the great classics
are things that come in vast tomes, packed with unnecessary waffle. I suppose
if I were actually a student of literature then I might make allusions to Romanticist and Modernist schools of writing; but I’m not, and alas I have very
little idea about those arbitrary definitions. All I know is that this
particular book is of the Modernist persuasion, as it helpfully points out on
the back, though I couldn’t possibly tell you what that means without reference
to Wikipedia; as of this moment, I cannot be bothered to look it up. My own
interpretation of this book is that it has about as much substance as a
Classic, but crammed into a tiny amount of space.
What we’re left with is one of the
densest books I have read for quite some time. To put a mind-boggling allusion
to work, Heart of Darkness has more
mass than it does weight.
The story is essentially just a very,
very long anecdote; a story that starts off in the third person only to then
end up being related through the speech of the main character, Marlow. We’re
sitting on a boat in the Thames, and Marlow tells us about his journey up the
Congo River, into the centre of Africa, during a particularly nasty bout of European
Colonialism. This is no ‘boys’-own’
Lawrence of Arabia adventure story, but a hard, gruesome look through the
eyes of Marlow as he witnesses the reality of late Nineteenth-Century colonial
rule in Africa, based on Conrad’s own experiences. Marlow’s goal? To locate a
man called Kurtz.
The book itself I found, in three days
reading, very hard-going, and were it any longer I might just have put the
thing down and never returned. Maybe it’s just not the sort of book I’m used
to, but there was something about the style of the writing that I found very
hard to keep up with. It wasn’t dull or boring, far from it in fact, but I
constantly found myself thrown off what was going on – to the extent that
within the space of a few sentences I could go from complete understanding to ‘not
having a clue as to what on Earth was going on’. It was too intense, maybe, or
too quick-paced. Most writers I have read up to this point have offered a bit
more help to the reader to understand the story, more description so you’re in
little doubt as to what you’re looking at, whereas in Heart of Darkness if you lose the thread for just a moment then you’re
dead in the water, and have to struggle to catch up again. Also the fact that
there is only one voice, Marlow’s, I find tends to distort the picture of the
story. It’s a very interesting picture, but it seems to me a little blurry, so
that I’m never certain on what I’m being presented with.
A very famous book, and one that
requires a great deal more attention than I’ve been able to pay it here. This
is not light reading, but something that, if you feel the need to read it, must
be treated with concentration. It’s a dark and gritty piece, one that invites
you to analyse and interpret it. I don’t wish to pay Heart of Darkness any disrespect, so I merely say that should you
ever want to read this, then approach with caution.
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