Joseph Conrad

I just finished listening to two of Conrad's most famous works, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, and I liked them very much. The prose is vigorous, the characters are memorable, and there is enough description of the exotic settings to make them seem exotic, without dominating the story or detracting from it. My favorite thing about Lord Jim was actually the narrator, a sea captain in his 40s named Marlowe. Conrad did something with him that I tried in the first draft of my current novel project, showing us a character by having him tell a story about someone else, and I think this is the best I have ever seen this done. Marlowe says little about himself, but by the end I thought I knew him well, and he was also a good narrator.

Heart of Darkness is a very weird story. The first 75% is the build up, with the narrator, Marlowe again,traveling to Congo and then up the river toward the farthest station, where the mysterious Kurtz resides. When Marlowe finally arrives, he sees a few things, has a brief conversation with a minor character, collects the dying Kurtz and loads him on the boat for home, where he dies before he says much beyond "the horror." One gathers that Kurtz, who set out for Africa as a humanitarian backed by tea-drinking association ladies, has turned into the leader of a marauding native band, but it is all very vague and we never hear why or how this happened. It is more like a description of a single intricate panel of images, a sort of Hieronymus Bosch altarpiece of white men in Africa. In one panel Kurtz arrives in his white suit, Bible in hand; in the next he lies dying with a ghastly expression on his shrunken face, mourned by a platoon of spear-wielding warriors and a brass-bedecked woman who may have been his wife. In the last scene Marlowe goes to see Kurtz's fiancee, with some vague idea of trying to tell her what happened to Kurtz. Seeing her in her pleasant apartment, in mourning clothes, weeping over Kurtz the great humanitarian, he loses heart and lies to her. Nobody safe at home in London, especially not a tea-drinking woman, could possibly understand.

It is a regular part of Conrad's world that some men get into situations like Kurtz's. For people safe at home in their studies to judge sailors in storms, soldiers in battle, or ivory traders on the Congo is simply absurd. There are the men who been to enough places and seen enough terrors to know, and there are the rest of us. Conrad, who spent twenty years at sea and himself sailed up the Congo, gives us a glimpse of what the men who went to those places saw and felt, and how they judged themselves and each other. It is a fascinating world, and I am looking for more Conrad to read.