Congo – Arthur Hofn

I Wonder If Anyone Else Will Go To Portugal With The Same Selection As Me

Last week I went to Portugal! I blogged about a previous trip I made to Albania and that was in January 2020, the last before travel became difficult; if I had only known… However Portugal was full of heat, sun, port and reading. Faro is a lovely place, although it’s small. The local towns are also well regarded and I’m sure to explore them would have been nice; but I had only booked a few days and to do it all it wasn’t enough.

The result was once I had discovered the main part of the town, I was able to just bask in the heat. I’m not by nature a sit on a beach type person, I always need to know what’s around that corner or over the horizon wherever I am. However due to a long story that results in me hurting my feet (I actually did write it but deleted it as I realised no one was going to be interested – oh the importance of being able to cut things from your work!) I ended up not being able to explore as much as I wanted to. Fine, I had books, and cafes and beaches and cheap beer!

I normally just take hand luggage, hey I’m an impoverished writer, and so with the even tighter sizes allowed I realised I had to take smaller books, which rather limited my choice (no I do not like to read e-books if I can help it). First up was a 1973 copy of Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

This is one of those stories within stories. Starting on a boat ready to leave the Thames the crew are waiting for the time to depart. The narrator tells us that one of his colleagues decides to entertain them with a story of his trip to Africa. The novel has a reputation of being a bit grim, I would say I’ve read worse and then I realise most things that happen in the fiction probably mirror the way things were in the real world back then. First published in 1899 as a serial (that’s a good idea) this deals with issues of colonialism and as such reading from the perspective of 2022 it raises probably more questions than the author intended. Although not directly stated Conrad uses the Belgian colony of Congo as his backdrop and it becomes clear that the title of the book isn’t so much to do with the dark heart or the interior of the continent, but that of the men that reigned misery upon it. It’s interesting that as a novel it rarely makes a judgement as explicitly as might be done these days, instead it records opinions and attitudes that at time of writing would have opened the eyes of the reader and these days which we already know about and find unacceptable; even the “good” guys use words within the text that are uncomfortable reading. It occurred to me that whilst my paperback came from the 1970s it’s strange to realise even not so long ago attitudes to such expressions of even concepts weren’t as they are now.

This isn’t in anyway a blame on just the other European nation’s attempts at Empire, it’s clear that although using a foreign power Conrad has the same ideas over what Britain was doing at the time. There is a very interesting correlation in the way that people of his days viewed Africa and how the Romans viewed Britain. To make the comparison between now and Conrad’s time, in many ways we are more enlightened and educated today, it’s just a shame that doesn’t go for everybody. I do wonder if holiday reading should be quite so… dark?

“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, “Come and find out”.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Heart Of Darkness is actually a short book (although in my copy the text had been formatted in such as way to make the pages dense with print) and so I moved on to my second smaller sized novel.

I’ve talked about Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories before and I will probably blog about them specifically at some point, but being the perfect size I grabbed one I hadn’t read before and packed it.

The Ark by Paul Erickson was first published by Target in 1986 in hardback and 1987 in paperback and is based on a televised story from 1996 (I had the 1993 reprint). I have seen the TV serial many times and the novel expands on a lot of the story but I’m glad it retains the classic line ‘take these strangers to the Security Kitchen’. Basically set way way into the future with Earth about to be destroyed the entire population create an Ark and travel to a new planet, unfortunately when the TARDIS turns up one of the companions has a cold for which the humans this far into the future are unconditioned and it becomes a major pandemic – hmm.

As I sat in a cafe reading this it struck me I was probably the only person in the Iberian peninsula reading a Target novelisation at that moment in time, a thought that amused me. I’m sure as summer continues Faro will see many many books being read by locals and tourist alike. Holidays are great for reading.

Buy Heart Of Darkness – by Joseph Conrad