After Heart of Dark­ness I thought I’d try another book by Con­rad. The choice was made easy by the Wikipedia entry for Nos­tromo, which quotes F. Scott Fitzger­ald as say­ing “I’d rather have writ­ten Nos­tromo than any other novel.”

Six weeks later, and I’m only a quar­ter of the way through. I’m drop­ping this book. I won’t say that the book’s first quar­ter is com­pletely unin­ter­est­ing. Its pic­ture of a trou­bled South Amer­ica coun­try and the way its internationally-focused upper class tries to act as a reform move­ment drew me in, but only so far. At this point the novel is still just a thinly-cloaked his­tory les­son with broadly-drawn car­i­ca­tures that have failed to become characters.

Let me be hon­est: I want some drama. I want some­one to betray the emo­tional expec­ta­tions of their assigned role. Can’t some­body (any­body?!) kiss the wrong lips, betray the wrong fighter, or at least have a cri­sis of faith in their God, life’s work, or politics?

I do believe the action gets saucier later on. But I’m too con­fused by the polit­i­cal actors of Costaguana (“who’s Avel­li­nos again?”) to care. I can check the Wikipedia pages on Venezuela and Colom­bia to see how the polit­cal drama plays out. What­ever per­sonal drama there is will have to be Fitzgerald’s.

I began Conrad’s clas­sic tale as a follow-up to last month’s State of Won­der by Ann Patch­ett. Her hero­ine trav­eled to the most remote reaches of the Ama­zon; all sto­ries that make the trip from the bland­ness of civ­i­liza­tion (Min­nesota in Patchett’s case) owe a debt to Conrad’s clas­sic tale of a steam­boat trip far up the Congo River.

The book cer­tainly has its odd­i­ties, start­ing with the nar­ra­tive voice: we are lis­ten­ing to a story told aboard a ship on the Thames that is wait­ing for a change of tide to send it on its way out to sea. The narrator-within-the-story, Mar­lowe, tells the entire tale in flash­back, with Con­rad only occa­sion­ally com­ing up for air to the deck of the Thames boat (Heart of Dark­ness was writ­ten as a three-part ser­ial; I assume these nar­ra­tive breaks are the stitch­ing between installments).

I had heard much about this book over the years so I was curi­ous to see the exact nature of the deprav­i­ties upon which the infa­mous Kurtz had indulged him­self. But two-thirds of the way through the book I real­ized we were never to really learn them. We know there’s a remote camp by a lake and an African tribe that regards him as some kind of demi-god, and we hear tell that he’s law­less toward other Euro­peans and single-minded in his quest for ivory. But these are all barely more than hinted glimpses.

The story turns out to be not so much about Kurtz as it is about Mar­lows’ imag­in­ings as he gets deeper into the con­ti­nent and gath­ers clues about the mys­tery man at the top of the river. I found this to be a relief, as Con­rad seems almost as unin­ter­ested in flesh­ing out the Africans along the way. Kurtz is a bril­liant civ­i­lized man; in the jun­gle his sav­agery is unleashed and he becomes a force unto himself.

I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of any­thing high or low. I had, even like the n******, to invoke him–himself his own exalted and incred­i­ble degra­da­tion. There was noth­ing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked him­self loose of the earth. Con­found the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.

Yes, this is a work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of a psy­chopath. If this were a mod­ern Show­time or AMC tele­vi­sion show, this would be the start of the action: the pro­duc­ers, writ­ers, and actors would leave lit­tle gore or deprav­ity to the imag­i­na­tion. But for Con­rad this is the moral­ity tale at the heart of the book. Shortly after being found, Kurtz con­ve­niently dies and our nar­ra­tor sails back down­stream, going (we are help­fully told) twice the speed as before, back out to the ocean and civilization.

More: 

• Wikipedia: Heart of Darkness
• Heart of Dark­ness on Project Gutenberg