Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

At first you might wonder what on earth these books could possibly have in common. Indeed, you might be thinking I’d taken leave of my senses for thinking of them in the same moment. The first is a classic, the first English novel of the 20^th century, studied and commented on by academics and students alike. The second is a children’s book, published in 2002, famous in its own way, but otherwise little known outside its fervent admirers, the children’s book industry and librarians. However, due to my eclectic taste in books, I found myself reading one after the other last month. Despite their very obvious differences, there seemed to be some parallels which would be useful in understanding both. And some of the differences can be seen through the lens of the developments and changes that the hundred years between them has brought.

I studied Heart of Darkness at university and found it impenetrable, bleak and inexorable. It felt like a comment, not on a time and series of events, but on humankind itself. The inescapable phrase, ‘The horror, the horror’ rang through my mind and lodged itself there as the book’s message in miniature. The evil at the heart of man – like in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – is etched on every page. Its claustrophobic, dense prose echoes the black heart of the forest, disorientating and fevered.

What I was not prepared for, this time when I read it, was the appalling racism at every turn. I believe Conrad was trying to subvert the accepted philosophy of his day, to expose the moral corruption at the centre of the glorious empire. It would definitely be a mistake to think that the narrator, Marlow, and Conrad are the same, have the same stance and the same outlook. I suspect that Conrad shared Marlow’s fascination with and horror over the disintegration of civilisation in the African jungle, his shrewd evaluation of the narrowness, superficiality, cruelty and moral turpitude of the Europeans there, and the fact that the evil at our heart is made universal, even encapsulating London, the then apex of the civilised world. I doubt (or at least wish to doubt) that he would be so calm and accepting of this as the natural state of things, or else why did he drag us, the reader, into that fevered nightmare? However, the dismissive infantilisation of the Africans, the total inability of any character but Kurtz, the corrupt centre of the book, to communicate with them, and the unacceptable language used to refer to them is hard now to read and is also difficult to separate from Conrad’s own ideology. How can I separate what is Conrad and what is Marlow in this book, except to say that the racism I speak of is the medium the book swims in, the air it breathes, while the comments on imperialism, humanity’s innate corruption and any reaction to it, seem instead to be the subject of the book rather than belonging to its very structure?

Perhaps not overly insightful comments, considering all that has been written on the subject, but that was my starting point. I then read Journey to the River Sea, set at the time (more or less) that Conrad wrote in and of, but written a century later. The difference in setting, from the African to the South American jungle is perhaps significant in that the Amazonian jungle is often now seen as the heart of healing, the place where modern medicines have come from, nature’s storehouse that we are now destroying. However, the distance from London, the cultural norm in these books, the attitude of some of the characters towards the peoples who live in the jungle, and the imperialist backdrop are close enough for us to glimpse parallels. Through the eyes of a child, Maia Fielding, we see the jungle and its people as miraculous, beautiful, dangerous but fascinating. The de-humanising attitude towards Africans of Conrad’s whole narrative is concentrated in the Carter family, a distillation of the colonial mind-set, and cruel and profligate to boot. Are we to believe that the African jungle doesn’t boast an equal amount of amazing, marvels of nature as the Amazonian jungle? No, it is only that Conrad is blind to them. Could it be that those Africans we see depicted in savagery and ignorance are just as loving, kind and human as the Brazilians in River Sea?

Conrad was of course using an allegory: the jungle and Africa as the darkness in all of our hearts. Ibbotson instead sees the jungle and Brazil as a symbol of freedom. Freedom from meaningless forms and etiquette, freedom from banality, freedom from misery and slavery. Such opposing views cannot help but strike the reader.

It appears to me that the journey we have all travelled from 1901 to 2002 (and now twenty years beyond) has been to turn the distant into beauty and freedom and to see in ourselves slavery and emptiness, rather than seeing the beauty, honour and righteousness in ourselves and the savagery in others. I suspect this is a journey British people have travelled as perpetrators of innumerable horrific crimes throughout the world, the ramifications of which cause pain, distress and death even now. I wonder whether newer empires, such as the USA, have yet come to this point in their journey? I feel they may still linger in the self-deceiving grandeur of the conqueror. As a country it is not until we are forced to look into the mirror and see our own corruption and disgrace that we can begin the journey away from self-deception.