Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad

I very rarely read fiction these days, but I grabbed Heart of Darkness the last time I went to Pennywise Books right next to my bank after having had it alluded at several times in King Leopold's Ghost which I read last year.

While small this book was really packed deep. Haunting really, as I read onwards my heart increasingly palpitated as I got further into the story as Marlow - narrating from the deck of a ship in the Thames - recounts his voyage up the Congo river towards a man named Kurtz. Kurtz as we are told - in hushed tones early in the work - is the head of the Central Station up the river, the most successful ivory trader by far, but alone in the wilds he's gone mad. The backdrop of the Congo Free State is pitch perfect as an element of late nineteenth century colonial Africa in the wake of the "scramble" for that continent. Conrad rather quickly - and effectively - shows the horrors and moral darkness of the peculiar form of colonialism that existed in the Congo at that time. Non-whites are shown with distain - at best just "niggers," but more often referred to as savages who can barely be excised from the jungle, or as cannibals. Coexisting with that most evident form of darkness is the theme of personal moral darkness as Marlow goes up the river and sees the trappings of civilization collapse, culminating in the most savage of sights at Kurtz's station. On the whole, I very much liked Heart of Darkness. It kept me enthralled throughout and managed to get much more meaning into just over a hundred pages than most books manage to get in four or five times that much.

***** out of *****