PRISON BLOG 52

BOOK REVIEW

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

The hype! The hype! Conrad’s Edwardian seaman’s tale, based on his own expedition up the Belgian-ruled Congo, is eventually strangled in its own dense pretentiousness as the narrator finally meets Mr. Kurtz in what is probably literature’s biggest anti-climax. The occasional flashes of sarcastic humour and the gritty portrait of sordid white colonial excess and its moral condemnation wilt under a typically thick prose, thick with a repetitious thickness, and a style prone to some irksome habits; such as every minute expression routinely being ascribed no less than four simultaneous elements. The meandering pace, the annoying lack of any actual detail about Kurtz, the pointlessly digressive – usually nautical – observations, the cursory treatment of the real action and the repetitive thickness of the thick repetition render this famed novella wholly underwhelming:

The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. “The horror! The horror!”

DON’T FORGET Tim’s Book and magazine collection for the Prison Library, please send your books and magazines to:
Tim Selwyn
Librarian/Unit 7
Hawkes Bay Prison
Private Bag 1600
Napier, NZ

Tim Selwyn (Editor of Tumeke!)
PRN 60477981
Hawkes Bay Prison
Currently appealing sedition conviction