Heart of Darkness (1899) By Joseph Conrad -- Illustrated edition (2013) By Matt Kish

The publication of this edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is different than previous print runs of the novel in that it is/was an artistic release – it’s illustrated. And it’s not just illustrated, its every-other-page is a full color illustration, a visual rendering of the text on the facing page. All in all, artist Matt Kish’s treatment of the book is a fascinating, and successful, endeavor.

At first thought one might think the novel – a telling of an early-European exploration of the Congo River – is an odd topic for illustration. Conrad’s book isn’t a travelogue, it’s an intense psychological study of the mind of Marlow, the expedition leader, and of the mindset of colonialism. Yet, that is exactly why the illustrated-treatment of the story works. When Conrad’s book was written in 1899, Africa was "the dark continent" – nothing but imagination. No one (a.k.a. Europeans) knew what lay beyond the coastal areas of Africa. As a result of this lack of information, they created fantasy nightmares of the interior. These “white-man fears” (some real, some not) lend themselves quite well to illustration. 

I picked up this book because it relates to two of my recent reads: Into Africa by Martin Dugard, and a later Conrad book, the Secret Agent, written in 1907.

Dugard’s book is a telling of the Stanley & Livingstone story. In his epilogue, Dugard credits Heart of Darkness as the “first” telling of that story, a claim that proved debatable when I repeated it -- having now read it, I think I side with those who question that claim. Yes, Livingstone once explored the Congo, but that was before he got “lost.” And, while Livingstone studied the vast cultural difference (vis-à-vis Europeans and Africans), he did so as an explorer. In Conrad’s book, Kurtz (the so-called Livingstone character) was an advance guard of exploiters, not explorers; and Marlow (the Stanley counterpart) was a professional sailor, not an international journalist.

Comparing Heart of Darkness with The Secret Agent is another issue. These are two vastly different storylines, yet both are told with Conrad’s exhaustive/exhausting writing style. The author is enamored with compound sentences that often come across as run-ons, endless run-ons. Yet, when one is telling the story of a living nightmare, a fast-paced endless run-on works.

Recommendation: Interesting from two standpoints, its illustrated treatment of a classic; and as documentation on the western mindset about Africa – in this case negative (contrasting sharply with the Tarzan treatment a few years later).  

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