Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

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.

The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkein

          The Hobbit was one of the first full-length novels I ever read, back in my childhood so many years ago. Back then I was hooked. Bilbo Baggins was a good protagonist, growing from just an un-ambitious Hobbit at the start of the story to a giant-spider killing hero about mid-way through. By the time I finished I was whole-heartedly in love with Tolkein’s fantasy world, though the sequel looked a little above my reading abilities at the time. With the prompting of Peter Jackson’s recent film, I have gone back to the original story and found myself a little underwhelmed.

          I knew what to expect, a simple children’s story with only a hint of Tolkein’s future developments, but I have to say the first few chapters were a bit disappointing even with this knowledge in mind. The story was dull and completely see-through; the Wizard Gandalf and a bunch of Dwarves show up at Bilbo’s house, lay out the premise of journeying to the Lonely Mountain, killing the dragon Smaug and reclaiming a great pile of treasure, and Bilbo, after a bit of persuading, agrees to accompany them for a share in said treasure. That all happens in the first chapter, and most of the book consists of random tangents and obstacles on the way towards that goal. The second chapter was probably the lowest point, where the group happens across the three trolls, and then Gandalf pulls a rabbit out of a hat and solves everything. During most of the book, the characters are still just a mess, the thirteen dwarves are merely a series of names, and it’s up to Gandalf to sort out literally everything that goes wrong. He leaves the group about half-way through the story for an unspecified reason, and this just goes to highlight how useless the whole Dwarf-company actually are – during the long slog through Mirkwood it’s up to Bilbo, the wild-card newcomer, to virtually carry the rest of the characters through.

          The Dwarves really are a useless bunch of faceless no-hopers, as far as characters go. That there are thirteen of them could have meant that some could have been fleshed out into fully-functioning characters; but no, they’re all effectively the same, bar the cursory input of Thorin, Fili/Kili, and Bombur the overweight comic-relief, and they act more like padding for the story rather than anything worthwhile.

          Okay, maybe I’m being a little too critical of this. Yes, I know it’s a children’s story, and I remember enjoying it when I was a youngster. If the story were more complicated then it might miss the point, and ignorance of a majority of the characters probably helps the reader to focus on Bilbo, as the protagonist. Right, now I’ve got my major gripes out of the way I’ll be a bit more positive.

          The best character? Gollum, the demented creature whom Bilbo exchanges riddles with, and inadvertently steals a magic ring from. Long before I became familiar with The Lord of the Rings, Gollum was the character who most stayed in my mind from The Hobbit. He’s just so vastly different from any of the other character in the book, so much more detailed in personality and speech. That his background is never explicitly revealed, only hinted at, is the best thing about him – a creature living underground, full of malice and treachery, but who has dim recollections of a time when this was not so. However, I have since learned that this might well be because of Tolkein’s subsequent revision of the character, after the original publication of the book; the reason Gollum might be more interesting is because he was one of several changes made in later editions of the novel, after Tolkein began work on The Lord of the Rings. Oh well; unless you read a first edition that won’t prove to be an issue, for in my copy he’s one of the best bits.

          One thing I should say is that The Hobbit starts off badly, but gets slowly better as it progresses. It’s not until the last quarter of the book that I really properly began to enjoy the thing. Smaug the dragon was quite excellent as an antagonist, but the real villain of the story was something quite unexpected. All through the novel we’ve known where it was going to end; at a confrontation with the dragon. But it’s the consequences of undertaking the quest that proves to be the real antagonist. The killing of Smaug sets off a chain of events that leads to a quite serious final few chapters, where what was once a simple children’s story about a quest in a world of magic gradually finds its feet as a tale of greed, and the consequences of the quest. I actually really enjoyed this bit, and it was worth getting through the crappy trolls in chapter two, and the slog through Mirkwood, just to reach this last section.

          I don’t think I can whole-heartedly recommend you read The Hobbit, as there are a couple of problems with it. Then again, as I said before it gets better as you go along, and by the time Bilbo and company reach the Lonely Mountain the real story has begun. You probably know already if you’re a fan of Tolkein, in which case I’ve probably just wasted your time. A real look at Tolkein will involve digesting The Lord of the Rings, because The Hobbit by comparison is just a cheesy little prologue, a wafer-thin hint at what is still to come.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

In a previous review I mentioned my... disdain for Victorian literature. Rather callously I dismissed it as long-winded, overwritten, and miserable to the degree of making me want to beat my head against the sideboard. I was aware that I was making a prejudiced and unfair generalisation, so now I am making up for past wrongs – and I am glad to say that my ignorance on this matter has been well and truly obliterated.

Charles Dickens, is a titan of Victorian literature. We all know him, even if we’ve never actually bothered to read any of his works. Under recommendation, I dug into Great Expectations and found myself enjoying it by the end of the very first page. In a nutshell, the story concerns the life of a young county urchin, Pip, orphaned and in the care of his adult sister and her husband, the village blacksmith. Pip, after many years, then finds that he is in line to inherit a considerable sum of money, and departs to London to become a wealthy so-and-so, and eventually, in the third section of the novel, the “shit hits the fan” (a very specific Victorian phrase I have used in order to sum up the overall state of things without giving away the plot). The story itself is very good, but what raises it to the state of absolute brilliance is the way it is told, and the characters who inhabit it.

Dickens’ writing is faultless. It contains a sense of humour that is more akin to Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) than to the abject dreary misery of Somerset Maugham (my nemesis of a writer, for Of Human Bondage, the most painfully depressingly slow book I have ever read). Great Expectations has much the same levels of depressing material, but the writing has a life to it that puts me in mind of the author chuckling on occasion, as he writes.

The start of the book details Pip’s childhood encounter with an escaped convict out on the moors. The convict threatens Pip to bring him food, and the young lad is so terrified that he does so, raiding his own home and coming away with, amongst other things, a pork pie. As he returns to the convict over the moors, Pip is so plagued by fear and guilt at his theft that he begins to see the very landscape and animals he passes as knowing him to be a thief. The cattle stare accusingly at him.

          ‘The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with Somebody-else’s pork pie! Stop him!”’ (chapter 3, Penguin Classics edition)

I am a fan of pork pies, and to see one take such an important role for a brief time gives me no end of pleasure. Many parts of the story stand out in my mind for their moments of literary perfection, and not just the ones that contain my favourite foods. I can only bow down in amazement at such a writer.

In terms of characters, Miss Havisham is the most striking – an embittered old woman, jilted on her wedding decades before, who has locked herself away in her decrepit mansion and keeps the place in exactly the same state as it was on that fateful day. She refuses to wear anything other than her tatty old wedding dress, and lives a life of theatrically orchestrated sorrow and hatred. In short, she is quite mad.

Alongside Pip’s domestic tyrant of a sister is Joe, technically Pip’s brother-in-law, but in reality they are fellow downtrodden souls under the tyrant’s boot, who have a strong and genuine friendship. There’s Jaggers the lawyer, who treats every conversation as a possibility for inviting indictment from anyone who happens to be within miles of earshot-range; Wemmick, Jagger’s dogsbody who has an affinity for ‘portable property’ and keeps his work-life and his home-life separate to such a massive degree that you might suspect him of having multiple-personality syndrome. There’s Wemmick’s deaf old father who goes by the designation of Aged Parent, and a bedridden old boatman who exists only as a force of barely-suppressed rage in the room upstairs, and mention must be made of Pip’s love interest Estella, the adoptive daughter of Miss Havisham – you remember Miss Havisham? Well Estella was raised by her, after Miss Havisham locked herself away amidst her stopped clocks, and her mummified wedding feast. What sort of lovely person is Estella going to turn out to be, we wonder.

And this is just my lucky-dip character guide, as there are so many others – incidental characters, important characters, all so very well fleshed out and developed.

There are moments of odd deliciousness throughout the story, ones that kept me reading long after I should have put the book down and indulged in the necessity of sleep. Chapter 23, for instance, where we meet the Pocket family, the chaos of the family home overwhelmed with children is probably my favourite part – though this is a very difficult choice to make, considering all I have to choose from.

I would have to conclude by saying that Great Expectations is one of the best novels I have ever read. It is a solid, enjoyable, engrossing story with remarkable, well-developed characters and one of the best writing styles I have ever encountered. There were one or two moments when a tear was almost brought to my eye, and anything that can dig that far down into my calcified heart must be a good thing. There is no more reason for me to wonder why Dickens is considered one of the greatest, and he has shown me that the dreary Victorian novelists I once abhorred are not what I expected them to be. Either that, or I’m growing more Victorian as time passes. In any event, if you haven’t read this book yet, then I thoroughly advise you to do so; you might be as surprised as I was, in which case you’ll have a thoroughly decent book to read.

Gravedigger, by Michael-Israel Jarvis

Gravedigger is an action/adventure fantasy – and before you switch off be assured that there are no elves, dwarves, dragons or dungeons; the setting is fairly original, and more attention has been paid to the characters and the story than to the fantasy elements, which in themselves all weave together nicely to create an interesting and supportive backdrop to the whole thing. The world in which the story is set is fairly easy to get into – the town at the beginning of the book is just a town, the people are just people, and the nasty oppressive government is just a group of nasty, oppressive government mages.       

As can be gleaned from the title of the book, the story is about a gravedigger. Perin Foundling, a young apprentice gravedigger who lives and works in the local graveyard, who gets caught up in events that will affect the entire future of the land of Valo and which lead him to Nagyevo, the bustling capital city. There he knuckles under the thumb of the Tacnimag (the government mages), signing on with a squad of militia, whilst he looks for some way to free an imprisoned friend of his, held by the Tacnimag. Naturally this promises violence.

          Good points about the book: the pace of the story is rather good. It starts off with just Perin and his mentor, an elderly gravedigger, as they eke out a living by burying deceased townsfolk. The old gravedigger’s philosophical approach to his work makes him one of the best characters, instantly believable, and that he passes his views on to his apprentice is one of the main driving forces behind the book. After a brief interlude the story picks up again as Perin travels to Nagyevo with his new friend Kesairl, who immediately gets captured by the Tacnimag on trumped-up charges, thus leaving the young gravedigger lost and adrift. While this section is slow, it’s not long before Perin signs up with the Borderers, a group of misfit ‘volunteer’ soldiers with whom interesting social dynamics and camaraderie develop as they investigate the mysterious appearance of ferocious beast-men called Drizen (okay, these guys are effectively Jarvis’ answer to Orcs, the archetypal bloodthirsty ‘evil soldier’, but they are scary at least). From the start of the Borderers’ section to the final chapter, the story is brilliant – it flows so nicely that it is damned difficult to put the book down, and at some points even impossible to do so.

          The characters are generally quite good, at least the ones who matter are quite good – but alas this leads onto one of the weakest parts of the book, the introduction of ‘a team’ in the joint character of the Borderers. There are around six of them, and they all have distinct characters, but alas their joint introduction in chapter 14 is handled a little clumsily, too much information being introduced at once. We just end up with a mushy splodge of characters. This is a typical Alistair MacLean mistake, and no matter how much character development or how many fancy nicknames are placed on them, the messiness of their introduction (and to a casual reader, the similarities of some of their names) just made me give up trying to care about them. When this happens with Alistair MacLean, it is best to just wait for some of the characters to be killed off, to save us the effort. Eventually one or two of the borderers struggle to put their heads above the pile of the others, but even so they still look to me like the same nondescript person, because it was impossible to disentangle each separate character during their joint introduction. This is not to say that every character is bad; on the contrary the non-Borderers are very good, such as the loud-mouth bar-dwelling lad Arranyo, and Neva, the irritating kid who dogs Perin’s every step within the city – they’re both introduced in much more memorable circumstances, and their characters are consistently built up, enabling the reader to easily appreciate them for what they are worth.

          While the story is told in a good and original way, I can’t help but feel that underneath it all is a story often told in the Fantasy genre – a young hero has to confront a terrible and evil enemy in order to save the world. A group of people/ a fellowship, come together to help him. There is a confrontation between Good and Evil of truly Epic proportions. This is a minor quibble, as few stories are completely original, and Gravedigger succeeds in telling the tale - which is what actually matters. There are few works of Fantasy that stick out in my mind for being good, and this I can admit is one of them.

          
         The last point I shall make before wrapping up, the approach to the violence in the book.

There is a lot of it.

A name like ‘Gravedigger’ doesn’t exactly conjure up cheerful images, but the gritty, graphic portrayal of the fights against the Drizen is definitely worth mentioning – but it is the psychological reactions of the characters that I want to point out. The effect that the conflict has immediately afterwards gives this story an edge that I have rarely seen - it is important to note that very few of the characters are hardened killers, the Borderers all being completely new to the job, and even my inability to tell the lesser characters apart did not stop the scene after the first Drizen encounter from being one of the most stirring and memorable in the book.

           
         So there you have my verdict: Gravedigger is a good book. I have a few other criticisms (the overly young-adult oriented subject matter, the lack of any female characters whatsoever, the clear division of ‘Good’ vs. ‘Evil’, the occasional overuse of the word ‘grin’) but I shan’t go into detail here because that would just be picking at threads. It is a cracking read, and is by all means worth a look – if so, you’ll never view a spade in the same light again. I have now been used as a publicity engine, so get yourself a copy on Kindle or something, as Michael-Israel Jarvis might be famous one day.