Photo by Wil C. Fry
★★ (2.3 of 5)
- Full Title: Heart Of Darkness And Selected Short Fiction
- Author: Joseph Conrad
- Year: 1899 (mine was 2021 Barnes & Noble special edition)
- Pages: 371
- Genre: Adventure, Colonialism
- Publisher: Barnes & Noble / Signature Classics / Sterling Publishing
- ISBN 978-1-4351-7231-9 (softcover)
- Wikipedia page
- Author’s Wikipedia page
Summary
My edition of this classic title includes far more than the title tale — the 1899 novella Heart Of Darkness only takes up 94 pages. The Secret Sharer (1909) is next, at 43 pages, followed by: Youth (1898), 33 pages; Typhoon (1902), 79 pages; Karain: A Memory (1897), 41 pages; and Falk: A Reminiscence (1901), 76 pages. I picked up this book after hearing about the title story for many years, including that it was the inspiration for a famous war movie — and also because various sources claim Joseph Conrad is “regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language”. (I came to vehemently disagree with that latter opinion as I read these works.)
★★ Heart Of Darkness, 1899
According to Wikipedia, this one is about a ferry-boat captain for a Belgian trading company who penetrates the African interior, specifically the Congo. However, in the story itself, neither Belgium nor the Congo (nor Africa, for that matter) is mentioned at all.
The story is told by an unnamed first-person narrator on a yawl anchored in the River Thames. After three pages of this narrator describing the yawl and the other men on it, one of the other men, Charles Marlow, begins to speak. The rest of the novella is in quotation marks: it is Marlow’s story, not that of the unnamed first-person narrator. Marlow tells of being assigned to captain a river steamboat in “that continent”, which is never named, but we can assume which one it is because Marlow and others in his story use the N-word a lot. Marlow was supposed to go up a river (we’re never told which one) to an ivory trading station and see about a man named Kurtz. When they eventually arrive, they find Kurtz very ill, load him on the boat and head home. Kurtz dies during this trip but first entrusts Marlow with a packet of papers. Marlow later meets with Kurtz’s fiancée and lies about Kurtz’s final words. None of this was interesting to me.
What made the story even less interesting was the way in which it was told, with Marlow often interrupting himself to “explain” in very vague terms something he had said vaguely. Nothing felt concrete or tangible. When Marlow would experience some emotion, I was never sure what had caused it and he explained it so poorly that I wasn’t even sure whether he was experiencing it or merely musing about it.
Taking place as it did during the height of British colonialism and white supremacy, I was impressed only with Conrad taking pains to push back against the prevailing views of the time. Despite freely using the N-word (in quotations) and other derogatory terms for Africans, Conrad (through Marlow) depicts them as victims of colonialism. He writes depicts the Europeans as idiots and their predilection for abusing the natives as absurd. Marlow worries for the health of the African workers he meets, while other Europeans seem immune to such empathy. (Strangely, one African critic in 1975 called this book “offensive” and “deplorable” for its depictions of Africa, perhaps having read a poor translation that didn’t make it clear Conrad/Marlow were against the prevailing view of Europeans at the time.)
One line stood out to me as worth remembering:
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”—page 10
★★ The Secret Sharer, 1909
An unnamed first-person narrator is captain of a British ship in the Gulf of Siam. During the night, he hears a sound and notices a naked man floating in the water, and the man (introduced as Leggatt) climbs up and joins the captain. The captain notices that Leggatt is very like himself in appearance, like looking in a mirror. He takes the man into his cabin and dresses him in his own clothes and doesn’t tell anyone else about him. The captain later learns that Leggatt has escaped from another nearby ship after killing a man. Later, the captain orders his ship to sail dangerously close to land so that Leggatt can secretly disembark and swim away.
I found the writing more clear and enjoyable than the first story, but the story itself was just as uninteresting to me.
★★★ Youth, 1898
Like the first story, this one begins with an unnamed first-person narrator describing a scene, and then one of the other men at the scene (Marlow again) begins telling a story. The rest is in quotations.
In this one, Marlow tells of a harrowing experience during his youth — the narrative is peppered with exclamations about the optimism and naivete of young people. Marlow is hired as second mate on a barque (all of the stories are full of obscure words for various specific types of boats and ships) commissioned to take a load of coal from England to Thailand. Nothing seems to go well. On its way to pick up the coal, the old ship’s ballast shifts; it has to wait a month for the coal to be loaded; then it is accidentally rammed by a steamer and three weeks are required for the repairs. Finally putting out to sea, the barque is smashed in a winter storm so it returns to Falmouth for refitting — which takes months. Eventually, the ship gets on its way, making it to near Australia when the coal combusts and begins a slow burn inside the hull. The whole ship burns, though the crew saves much of its gear for the “underwriters” in three small boats.
I think this one is remarkable for its depictions of the terrors of sailing life and the attitudes of various characters experiencing it. The story itself is supposedly somewhat autobiographical.
★★★★ Typhoon, 1902
In this one, told in the third person, a Captain MacWhirr commands a British steamer (sailing under the Siamese flag for economic reasons) and sails it directly into a typhoon, against the advice of his underlings. For me, it was the best of the six stories in this book. Not only were the descriptions of the storm so tangible that I felt drenched and wind-battered while reading it, but the interactions between the men aboard felt terribly realistic. The author also went to great pains to show how a steam ship is different from a sailing vessel, which was probably a big deal at the time for anyone interested in maritime activities.
There is also an astounding display of succinctness, in which Conrad manages to describe the entire second half of the typhoon experience in five words. After the ship has been battered for an unknown amount of time, it has survived into the peaceful eye of the storm and is about to go through the other side. After the captain says of his ship: “I wouldn’t like to lose her”, Conrad narrates: “He was spared that annoyance.” and immediately skips forward to arriving safely at port. Those five words saved a lot of writing time, and saved the reader the trouble of digesting another few dozen pages that probably would have been very much like the preceding pages. I think it was brilliant, though it was disconcerting at the time, expecting as I was another narration of storm experience.
The only downside for me in this story is that Conrad switches perspective from one character to the next without any warning. We’ll be reading from MacWhirr’s point of view but then suddenly we’re in another room and another character is present without MacWhirr. This took a little getting used to.
★★ Karain: A Memory (1897)
In this one, a European ship found its way up a river into the heart of an island where an isolated civilization lives, cut off from the rest of the world by a circular mountain range. The ruler of the tribe is Karain, a man from somewhere else and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the terrible events of his secret past — which he eventually tells to the Europeans because he thinks their scientific culture can negate the bad magic that haunts him.
★ Falk: A Reminiscence (1901)
Falk is an annoying tugboat master in some small harbor somewhere. That’s the whole story. Somehow it took Conrad 70-something pages to say that one sentence.
Conclusion
My two-star rating at top is the average for this whole book (14 total stars for six stories, an average of 2.3). Typhoon was amazing and well worth reading, though it probably would have been even more enjoyable if I had been familiar with any nautical terms besides “boat” and “ocean” (but despite my birth on a Pacific island, I have spent almost the entirety of my life very far inland with almost no interest in seafaring life outside Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson). The other stories were dull and difficult to read. The least interesting was Falk, and a close second was the title story that everyone raves about.
comments powered by Disqus