Review: Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899; this edition Green Integer 2003)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4900.Heart_of_Darkness?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_17

A dreamlike tale of a man’s moral integrity challenged by the barbarity around him

In this famous novella, Marlow recounts the story of his voyage to the Belgian Congo one evening while he and others are moored on a boat in the Thames.
It is written in an old-fashioned style (published 1899) that modern readers may find difficult (I did). For example, he begins with a long, though beautiful, description of the Thames ‘crowded with memories of men and ships’, which strains the attention span.
Marlow decides to seek his fortune. He wants to go to somewhere that was ‘a blank space on the map’ and procures himself a position as captain of a steamboat involved in the ivory trade. He finds that the steamboat has sunk and is dredged up to dry dock, where Marlow must repair it, an enterprise thwarted by the inefficiency of bureaucracy and the resulting lack of supplies. High on his list of wants is ‘rickets’, of which there had been thousands at the coast.
From other white men he hears complimentary things about the mysterious Kurtz, another ivory trader, the man he is supposed to meet. He eventually sets off with a crew of cannibals, and his descriptions of the jungle they float past—dense, oppressive silences ‘with the word ivory ringing in the air’, punctuated from time to time by threatening native drums whipping the crew into a frenzy—are dark and disturbing.
Finally arriving at Kurtz’s Inner Station, they discover that the man has set himself up as a sort of god, and a collection of severed heads on posts attest to his omnipotence. Kurtz is determined to ‘civilise’ the natives, his motto being ‘exterminate the brutes’. The steamer breaks down, and they have to dry dock again. Kurtz dies, uttering the last words, ‘the horror, the horror’.
Marlow struggles to maintain his moral integrity, with all the savagery around him, and he struggles against Kurtz in his descent into madness. He barely survives but makes it back to Europe.
Along the Congo River, exploitation of the native black men is at its most raw, and the scenes Marlow describes are nightmarish. Various techniques add to the dreaminess. For example, no character other than Kurtz is named. It is often unclear where Marlow is situated within the narrative. He begins telling us him impressions of a place before he has told us he has travelled to that place. The dream-like feel of this book led to its providing the inspiration for the film Apocalypse Now. The nebulousness is artful, but makes for difficult reading.
This is a ‘hero’s journey’ where the hero doesn’t prevail, but instead returns home haunted by the horrors he has seen.