Welcome to the jungle

If these weighty concepts sound too much like schoolwork, be assured that reading Patchett is anything but a slog. Author of the devastating memoir , Patchett writes with swiftness and clarity. And her stalking of Big Literary Game — nobody rewrites Conrad without understanding that’s what she’s doing — hasn’t hindered her ability to explore the finer emotional detail of human relationships.

The novel opens in cold, pristine Minnesota, an almost sterile environment compared to the riot of garish color, searing heat and potential danger of exotic South America. Marina’s boss Mr. Fox — that’s how she thinks of him, although he’s her lover as well as her CEO — comes to her office to announce that her colleague Anders Eckman, who had been sent to the Amazon to keep tabs on a scientist researching a miracle drug for the company, is dead. Oddly, his demise is announced via airmail. The scientist he’d been sent to monitor, Dr. Annick Swenson, “won’t use the phone, or she says it doesn’t work there.” There’s no Internet connection, either. And so Anders’ death is passed along on stationery puckered by rain, and Marina and Mr. Fox must break the news to his wife and young sons.

The sad story could end there, but it doesn’t. Swenson has written that Anders died of a fever and that “we chose to bury him here in a manner in keeping with his Christian traditions. I must tell you it was no small task.” Anders’ stricken wife wants detail. Mr. Fox wants more information on Dr. Swenson’s project. And Marina, who was a med-school resident under Swenson until a dreadful accident shifted her focus to research, finds herself as designated emissary. Plagued by nightmares — dreamscapes that grow a bit tedious as the book wears on — she flies to Brazil and makes her way to the edge of civilization, hoping to find someone to take her down the river where her despotic former mentor is working and living with a primitive tribe called the Lakashi.

Buddies in the Saddle: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

Plot. I was in college when I read this novella by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and surely must have understood only one-tenth of it at best. Reading for plot then, as one does at that age, there is not much to hang your hat on. The narrator, Marlow, captains a scow on an African River, and after many months of delays finally reaches an outpost run by an ivory hunter named Kurtz. The natives who work for the company are used brutally as slaves, and efficiency of operations is less than zero. He sees waste of all kinds on all sides. The whites stationed along the river are intent only on personal gain and spend their time waiting for shipments of cargo or news that seems never to arrive. Only a bookkeeper is industriously employed, but it’s not clear that he actually accomplishes anything of value. The ominous presence of the jungle pressing in on both sides is so full of warning you can’t miss it. That is unless you are 20, like I was, and blithely reading this as an adventure story along the lines of H. Rider Haggard. The portrayal of the colonial presence in Africa is itself full of horrors. But there’s no mistaking that truly unutterable and inconceivable horror lurks beyond the trees that line the river. Not the jungle itself but some Black Hole-scale evil mutely watches from the shadowy undergrowth.   More disturbing still is the trance-like worship into which Kurtz’s admirers fall. A wandering young man from Russia has had the privilege of learning at the great man’s knee. While he grasps that Kurtz is dangerous, he happily remains in his grip. He is an instructive study in the self-effacing devotion people gladly bestow on a demagogue. The story, of course, doesn’t stop there. Marlow returns home and pays his respects to the woman who was Kurtz’s “intended.” Fully absorbed in her own melodrama, she is in deep mourning for a heroic man who had long ceased to exist as she knew him. Preserving her romantic myth about Kurtz, Marlow makes no attempt to tell her the truth of what happened. The horror that lies at the heart of civilized men remains a secret. Here we have another Allan Quartermaine. An adventurer, he has seen a lot of the world, and his knowledge has made him something of a social misfit. His friends, who sit on the ship’s deck on the Thames listening to his story, don’t believe everything he says.

Heart Of Darkness

Heart of darkness

Heart of Darkness, Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition

Heart of darkness

Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer