But while it was written around facts Conrad knew to be true from his own experience, the power of Heart of Darkness comes from what Conrad adds. In his 1917 author’s note, Conrad described how Heart of Darkness was more than the exercise of memory represented by Youth.

Heart of Darkness is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.

It is in the character of Mr Kurtz – the mysterious figure whose moral compass has apparently gone haywire upriver deep in the jungle – that Conrad’s art reaches its highest form. People have sought the individual on whom Conrad based Mr Kurtz but the character is not a portrait of a single person. Instead, Mr Kurtz is a composite that includes elements of the acquisitive Belgian King, Leopold, and Henry Morton Stanley, the chancer-turned-explorer, who was hired by the king to stake the Congo, and a number of other colonial pioneers. But the most powerful feature of Mr Kurtz is that he includes elements of us all, characteristics of weakness, venality and arrogance that we can identify in ourselves. As a work of art, he is a masterpiece.

Heart of Darkness was written at the dawn of the colonial era in Africa and part of its power clearly comes from its eloquent denunciation of the conceit behind colonialism. But the real power of the book comes from its harrowing and often ambiguous account of humanity’s moral decay. The lack of integrity of outsiders’ values, their guilt and complicity are all offered up by Marlow as he struggles to distinguish between memories of his time on the river and subsequent nightmares, and the reality that his struggle has no clear, unequivocal conclusion makes reading Heart of Darkness today as richly rewarding as it was in the Edwardian era. To continue Conrad’s musical metaphor, Heart of Darkness is more score than manuscript and just as no two performances of the same musical score are alike, no two readings of Heart of Darkness prompt exactly the same reaction.

Tim Butcher, Author of Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s
Broken Heart (Chatto & Windus, 2007)

HEART OF DARKNESS

I

THE NELLIE, A cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.