Only 40,000 words long, this story of colonial brutality is a mesmerisingly ambiguous voyage into the darkest parts of the soul
Conrad’s famous novella is based on a real journey the author took up the Congo in 1890, during King Leopold II of Belgium’s horrific rule. It is a fantastic, imaginative journey to find a man named Kurtz who has lost his mind in the African jungle. It is a journey into inner space; a metaphorical investigation into the turbid waters of the human soul. It is a political journey into the dark heart of European colonialism. It is a nightmare journey, into horror. It is a journey to nowhere, set on a boat lying motionless and at anchor on the river Thames, which also “has been one of the dark places on the earth”.
There’s no shortage of journeys to talk about in relation to Heart of Darkness – but selfishly, I want to talk about my own. Few things have had such a profound effect on me as my passage towards understanding this book. When I began to realise how many possibilities the book contains, and how beautifully Conrad brings out their meanings, I felt enlightenment. A vague kind of enlightenment, it’s true. One, in fact, described by Conrad himself in a typically glorious – and typically elusive – passage about his narrator Marlow’s storytelling style:
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