HEART OF DARKNESS

Joseph Conrad’s chilling tale of a man forming his own society in the Congo circa 1910.

While it’s well known that this story was the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal Apocalypse Now, it’s probably less well known that Heart of Darkness is a novella - only three chapters long. Polish born Conrad himself lived for a while in The Congo - when under Belgian control - and his writing mirrors his first hand experience. Everyone’s seen the film so there’s no need to retell the plot except to say that in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is the head of an ivory trading post deep inland on the Congo River. Nor is Marlow, the narrator of the piece, intent on killing Kurtz, merely to meet him. As a descriptive piece about the exploitative life of whites in Africa shortly after the fin de siecle it is without comparison. Whether he is condemning said life is still up for debate however. Is the film better than the novel? Whilst they have obvious similarities they are actually very different. The horror. The horror.