Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

This is a review of Joseph Conrad´s Heart of Darkness which was published in 1902. It´s hard to say which genre it belongs to but I´d say it´s a mix of drama, thriller and novella.

The story takes place on a steamboat going up a river in Africa, sometime during the 19^th century. It is never said on which river or where in Africa the story takes part, however the description of the landscape and the history of Joseph Conrad hints that it is the Congo river.

Heart of Darkness is about a man called Charles Marlow, an Englishman who takes a job as a steamboat captain for a trading company. From there, the story is rather blurry. Marlow sets out to find a man called Kurtz who is also working for the trading company. Kurtz is positioned in Africa and is supposed to find ivory for the company, but a rumor says that he has gotten ill. Therefore Marlow is sent to find him and bring him back.

Marlow is at first a regular young man, happy to be working as a captain for the trading company. As he´s traveling along the river and sees the darkness in men, the darkness of colonization and the darkness of the wild nature he goes from happiness to anger and indifference.

Heart of Darkness was rather difficult to read because it´s written in a strange way. There are barely any chapters and you are never really sure of what´s happening in the story. You´ll often have to backtrack and read some parts a couple of times, and still you can´t really make any sense of it. A good example is when Marlow is looking for a person. Suddenly they talk about this person as if he´s dead and buried and just as sudden this person is in their party and alive. The scenery also changes without warning. On one page Marlow is on the steamer, and when you flip the page he´s on land, perhaps half a year forward in the story. It gets very confusing.

Heart of Darkness is a good book, but not more. It portraits the evil of men and colonization in a good way, but that´s it. It´s not the kind of book that keeps you glued to the pages since there aren´t really any thrilling moments, even though there could be if it were written in a different way.

I wouldn´t recommend Heart of Darkness to the regular reader. Heart of darkness is for those who´d like to see what the 19^th century colonization´s was really about and how greed and violence changes men.

Written by Robin