We read the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad for our Siblings’ Book Club in 2018. This graphic novel is my first return to the story, and it certainly carries with it the same heat and bleakness of life as the original story. Peter Kruper’s adaptation is well composed.
Like the novella, this story is told by Marlow to Conrad as they sit aboard a ship awaiting the changing of the tide. Kruper notes that this story, while fiction, was likely based off Conrad’s own journey up through the Congo in 1890, so it’s really hard to tell which aspects are fiction and which aren’t. Needless to say, handling the retelling of a tale thrice removed cannot be easy, but Kruper’s tweaks in style from Now to Then cause for an easy flow.
Marlow finds himself working for an organization trying to bring the genius and expert ivory-hunter Kurtz back to the coast. He’s been away too long and he’s fallen ill—he needs to come home. Kurtz has come to rule the upper river as king of sorts, murdering anyone who dare oppose him, and he uses the natives as slaves to hunt his ivory (elephant being a very similar plot point to the book we’re reading now, King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard who also authored She). Marlow spends months trying to reach Kurtz, witnessing many of the atrocities he and other greedy white “pilgrims” commit against the natives, cannibals though they may be, but he remains only that, a witness. In the end, he rescues Kurtz who dies on the voyage back downriver, and he himself survives to share Kurtz’s letters with his betrothed. What he can’t share with her, however, were Kurtz’s last words.
Kruper’s monochromatic artwork comes in two styles, one for the Now and another for the Then of the story. The Now is clean while the Then (the majority of the book) is far rougher. I enjoyed his lines which occasionally cover a two-page spread, leading the eye where it ought to go.
Kruper admits to having taken great care with the African natives, trying to draw them genuinely, attempting to avoid any implications of stereotyping, yet the white characters in this book tend to be caricatures—either fat, ugly, and obese, or boxy. Only Kurtz has a normal human shape, yet he’s also a skeletal creature and terrifying. I understand why Kruper made the choice for the Africans, but I don’t understand why he did the opposite for the white people. What started as an honorable choice just now looks like a double-standard. Kind of annoying.
I love the images he’s hidden throughout, though. At night, the jungle surrounding the river literally comes alive. It’s worth looking out for. And at one point, Marlow is smoking a pipe and talking lineage, while the smoke wafting up from the bowl is a map of Europe. Pretty clever!
Not surprisingly, Kruper plays a bit with light in this book, emphasizing through the lack of color the titular them of darkness. The darkness in Conrad’s tale appears to be the darkness of souls—the greed of the company, the blood-lust of the pilgrims, the power hunger of Kurtz, and what’s ultimately the depressing memories within Marlow who harbors it all. Conrad himself is just the first audience and now the messenger. It’s left to us, then, to ponder the story and its message and, maybe, to do something about it.
This was a great adaptation. It’s a far different style than Slaughterhouse Five or Anne Frank’s Diary, yet each artist has mixed the feel of the books with their own personalities making for powerful reinterpretations of each of these classics.
©2021 E.T.
Read More from Joseph Conrad:
- Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Youth (1898)
- Typhoon (1902)
- The Secret Sharer (1910)
- Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2020; adapted by Peter Kruper)