A Book A Week - Week 47: Heart of Darkness

This week's book:
   Heart of Darkness   by Joseph Conrad

Grade:  A+

Well... this one will make you think.  That's a good thing.

First off, this book is over 100 years old.  I had no idea.  It was first published in 1899.  Which means it has the kind of sensibility, format, and style that you would expect from a 19th Century novel.  Which is not to say it's bad, it's just dated.  Vintage, if you were to think of it as clothes.

The framing device is the narrator, Marlow, telling his sailing companions on the Thames River of the adventure he had when he took a job on the Dark Continent - Africa - as Captain of a riverboat for The Company.

Seems simple enough, right?  Marlow, who has always wanted to travel and explore and accomplish great things, gets the chance to do so.  Remember this was written during the waning years of global imperialism, when there were still small pockets of the globe available for Western powers to claim.  It was before World War I, when the old national paradigms came crashing down into the fog of mustard gas.  It was when the promise of imperialism still seemed benign.  The author puts the lie to that notion.

Reading it now, Marlow's voyage up the river, searching for Mr. Kurtz, a Company man more accomplished than all the other Company men, is an allegory for corporate America.  Yes, at the time it was an indictment of the imperial system, as Marlow is confronted with the awful reality of colonial life under imperial rule.  But the malaise of incompetent Company men, each out for only themselves but not up to the task of doing it well, combined with the hopelessness of the natives who can only suffer and die, sounds an awful lot to me like the way public companies are run today.  The fatalistic, morally resigned underlings led by horrible human beings who aren't worthy of the positions they hold.

No, I do not think I'm reading too much into it.

Marlow does find Kurtz, of course, who has made himself into a god (maybe, maybe not) for the local people.  Kurtz is clearly insane, and even though he's a Company man, insists that what he's done he's accomplished on his own, even though he's done it for the Company and with Company resources, with the hope - as all Company men have - of rising higher and higher in the Company hierarchy.
   Yee-ow.  It's like Mr. Conrad was peering through a crystal ball across 100 years.  Spooky.

I loved reading this book.  Makes me kind of wish I'd read it when I was supposed to, back in High School.  Of course I wouldn't have appreciated it then.
    As I mentioned, the execution is dated.  The narrative is one man telling the others what happened to him through extended dialogue, which is something that would never fly today.
   But the language is evocative, if at times a little florid.  Marlow as narrator veers into introspection a lot, as books of the time did, but it never seems gratuitous, it never seems like the author filling a page count.
   And the themes... the themes...  When I can read a book and recognize the indictment of the political structure of the author's times, and at the same time find an indictment of my own time and the prevailing political structure now, I know I've found something special.

You have to read this book, not only because you should have years ago and never did, but because it will make you think about how you live your life right now. 

Next week:
  A Modern Family  by Socrates Adams
New fiction from a small press.  I've had luck so far, this could turn out pretty good.