Colm Prunty

Heart of Darkness

October 20, 2024 | 2 Minute Read

I bought the paperback of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness something like twenty years ago. It has followed me around multiple countries since then, unread. I don’t know specifically why I picked it up now, I’m in the rare position of picking through my bookshelf trying to find things I haven’t actually read and there it was with one shining advantage: it’s really short. One hundred pages, plus a few more for fun. I also am probably willing to go on record saying Apocalypse Now is my favourite film, so I really should get around to it.

Turns out there’s a framing device, a sailor Marlow is sitting on a ship with some dudes in Gravesend telling them things that happened to him in the Congo. Side note: I played for an amateur football team in Greenwich in 2011-2013 or thereabouts, and our goalkeeper lived in Gravesend. Someone always went out to pick him up, that’s how hard it was to get a goalkeeper. Anyway, Marlow gets to Africa and hears a lot about this guy Kurtz and how cool he is and how good he is at talking, and basically falls in love with him by proxy.

So he goes upriver on his little paddleboat thingy, meets Kurtz’s Mouth of Sauron-type guy, his hype man, gets attacked by natives a little bit. Kurtz appears, carried on a stretcher in the distance somewhere, I think Marlow hears him speak. It’s been a day and I can’t remember. He’s in pretty bad shape, Mouth of Sauron has supposedly nursed him through two major illnesses. Kurtz has gotten all the locals to worship him, and uses them to go on raiding parties to nearby places to steal ivory, of which he has amassed a huge pile. He’s decorated his place with heads on spikes, presumably as a warning to others, and is written as extremely tall and very thin. Not latter-day Marlon Brando.

Kurtz leaves with Marlow but dies pretty soon afterwards. His last words are, as you’d expect, “the horror, the horror”. Marlow goes to meet Kurtz’s “intended” and they bond over how awesome he was until she asks what his last words were. Marlow recalls him saying “the horror”, and then awkwardly says “uh, yeah, he said your name last” and she’s quite pleased with that.