Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg

 Interesting concepts abound here.   A decade after the planet was restored to its sentient people, Edmund Gundersen feels a compulsion to return to Belzagor to put things right on his own account.   A former worker for the colonial power, Gundersen was peripherally involved in some of the misdeeds that went on.   He encountered the notorious Kurtz (yes, Kurtz) who shared snake venom with one of the two sentient people, the elephantine nildoror.   Gundersen once saw Kurtz, venomed up to the gills himself, dance with the nildoror.   Gundersen's time on Belzagor wasn't all bad, though.   He met and fell in love with the beautiful Seema.

But now Seema is partnered up with Kurtz.   Kurtz, she says, is off on an expedition, but her sulidor (the sulidoror are the other sentient people on Belzagor, giant ape-like people) tells Gundersen that Kurtz is hidden away on the compound, ill.    Gundersen sees him - and is horrified.

It is rare for a planet to have two sentient races, particularly two races so strikingly different.   Both have speech, both are said to have souls.   The land is divided between them.   The nildoror have the fertile plains, the sulidoror occupy the misty uplands.   The nildoror are vegetarian grazers, the sulidoror omnivore hunter-gatherers.   There is no emnity: the two races come and go across one another's territory   Both have seemingly come to terms with their colonial past in which the sulidoror were servants, the nildoror transport.   They continue to provide these services for human tourists.   Now they do it by consent.

Gundersen has always got on reasonably well with the natives of Belzagor.   He can speak both languages, though he is not so fluent with the gestures that provide nuance.   He politely seeks permission from a senior nildor to go to the hill country.   Permission is granted so long as he brings back Cedric Cullen, who has apparently commited a serious transgression and exiled himself among the sulidoror.   Gundersen wants to find out what happened to Kurtz in the hill country.   Most of all he wants to find out about the rebirth ceremony the nildoror undergo there.   Every twenty years ot so a nildor is summoned to the rebirthing.   This was Gundersen's transgression: he needed nildoror to help repair a breached dam and prevented them going on their rebirthing trek.    So off he goes - into the heart of darkness.

Yes, Downward to the Earth is a sci fi take on the Conrad classic.   The question in both is what has Kurtz found that has turned him into a monster?   'The horror ...  the horror...."    Silverberg's version pays off big time, with a twist that I absolutely didn't see coming.   This is the first time I have read any Silverberg.   I was very impressed.

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad

The deeper I got into Nostromo, the more I was reminded of Camus' The Plague. Both dissect closed societies under stress; both share a preoccupation with moral corruption. Just as The Plague isn't really about the epidemic, so Nostromo isn't really about the title character, who barely appears in the first half of the 450-page book, or even about the San Tome silver mine which infects the lives of everyone in the enclave of Costaguana.  The plague bacillus and the silver mine are merely the causative agents of their respective stories, Nostromo the symptom.

Conrad's theme - certainly the theme of Nostromo and The Heart of Darkness - is the corruption of imperialist capitalism. I suppose, in a sense, it is also the theme of The Secret Agent in so far as imperialism and capitalism are what the anarchists seek to overthrow. Conrad, it seems to me, has no problem with Western powers seeking to 'civilise' the indigenous populations of Africa and South America. Despite the notorious title of one of his novels, Conrad does not strike me as racist in the context of his time. His natives are not debased or in any way contemptible. To help them with work and education is, he seems to say, honourable. His venom is reserved for the secondary agents of change, the money-men who exploit - indeed, steal - the natural resources of the subject territories. The monster Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is the company man who goes into the wilderness to mop up all the ivory he can find, not the dying man gone native that Marlow brings back downriver. In Nostromo we have the American financier Holroyd, presented as a figure of ludicrous pomposity during his brief visit to Costaguana. It is Holroyd who bankrolls Charles Gould in asserting his rights to the silver mine - the 'Gould Concession' that killed his uncle and destroyed his father. It is Holroyd's foolish foray south that cements the reputation of Nostromo, the capataz de cargadores, who rescues him from the untamed wilderness.


Nostromo and Charles Gould are seemingly opposites - the former an Italian sailor who has pitched up by chance in Costaguana complete with assumed name, Gould the third-generation European resident, the pillar of society, heir to controversial rights. Actually they are both victims of Holroyd and his cash. With Holroyd's money behind him Gould devotes every last iota of his energy to his mine, neglecting his wife, becoming apathetic to old friends and neighbours. When revolution comes, as it regularly does in Costaguana, his only concern is preventing the soldier-politicians getting hold of his silver. Nostromo, meanwhile, finds that his fame as the preserver of Holroyd - and, indeed, at least one unseated president - has outstripped his status as capataz of the stevedores who operate the seaport of Sulaco for its other offshore exploiters, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company. Where Charles Gould is aloof and detached, Nostromo cultivates his own myth and becomes peripherally involved with every aspect of Cosraguanan society. When the Montero revolution threatens, it is inevitably Nostromo that Charles Gould enlists to take his silver out to the OSN steamer that will take it north to Holroyd. In that single transaction both men are corrupted beyond redemption.


One last link with The Plague is the doctor. Bernard Rieux is Camus' hero but in Nostromo's Dr Monyngham the only truly honest man and thus cannot be heroic. Monyngham, the ugly outsider, who moons hopelessly over Gould's wife, knows his own worthlessness. Years ago, a young idealist, he was tortured by a previous regime and after they had starved him and crippled him told them everything they wanted to know. Monyngham is ugly and friendless and not even very good at his job - but he knows corruption when he sees it. There is a nighttime scene between the doctor and Nostromo in the commandeered offices of the ONS, with the body of another pathetic torture victim hanging in background, that has to be one of the greatest scenes in all literature.
Conrad goes to phenomenal lengths to bring us the history and topography of his fictional republic. He uses startlingly modern tricks to take us inside his world. The Monterist revolution is daringly not shown because it would detract from the Faustian pact between Gould and the capataz. Instead it recounted as the boring reminiscences given years later to foriegn visitors by the genial OSN agent Mitchell whose claim to fame is that he was the discoverer and first patron of Nostromo.


The only flaw, it has to be said, is Conrad's inability to create convincing women. There are, famously, no women in the main narrative of Heart of Darkness, only the faintly spectral fiancee of Kurtz whom Marlow visits at the end. In Nostomo there are lots of women - Mrs Gould, the first lady of Sulaco; Antonia, the beautiful daughter of the great Costaguanan democrat and historian; the wife and daughters of Georgio Viola, the former follower of Garibaldi. Sadly none of them leap off the page. Their role is to succour and suffer.


Nonetheless, Nostromo remains a masterpiece.

Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad

Before this, the only Conrad I'd read was The Secret Agent, interesting enough but not dazzling. I knew Heart of Darkness's reputation but, despite being the basis for Apocalypse Now, I had not been attracted. Big mistake, it turns out.

First off, it's a novella, only three chapters long, which enables Conrad to create and sustain an oppressively dark atmosphere.  Even though the key action all takes place on the River Congo, everything is dark, primeval, threatening.  Marlow becomes obsessed by Kurtz because everyone he comes across speaks of him like a god.  Long before they find Kurtz's station they hear he is ill, that he may even have died.  Then they find him, defeated and dying, kept going only by his fascination with this antediluvian wilderness.

It's amazing to think that English wasn't even Conrad's second language.  Even when he first decided to become a novelist he wanted to be a French one.  Certainly the shorter French form has paid off brilliantly in Heart of Darkness - so much of the descriptive prose teeters on the edge of Symbolism, the key movement in French literature of the Belle Epoch.  French dialogue is differently punctuated and might have been easier for Conrad than the English, given we have Marlow telling his cronies in the Port of London his first-person account of the quest for Kurtz, including the tales told by the ex-pats he encounters along the way and, of course, Kurtz himself.  Everything is allusive in this tightly contained world.  Nothing is certain.  Kurtz is a character like no other I can think of - seedy, broken, twisted, perhaps even deranged, but still charismatic, above and beyond pity or compassion, utterly compulsive. Harking back to Apocalypse Now, no wonder they had to fly in Marlon Brando to play him.

God, it's a staggering achievement. Conrad, of course, writes from the heart. He had been to the Congo as a young sailor.  It affected him so profoundly that he tried to shoot himself through the heart.  It is why he gave up the sea and took to writing.  From such suffering comes art of the highest order.