ABSTRACT
When I first tried to read Conrad I found him very difficult and had to give him up. I knew that he was a highly respected author of sea stories and I was attracted to the title Lord Jim. I think maybe the name ‘Jim’ reminded me of Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island and I was expecting a rollicking tale of a boy hero’s adventures with rascally pirates. But Conrad’s way with words is very different from Stevenson’s: I got all tangled up in the rather convoluted narrative and had to abandon ship. I did read Lord Jim many years later when I had more patience, and found it very enjoyable. But before that I discovered Heart of Darkness in a different way. I went to see the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now, which was based on the Conrad story. If you have seen it you will remember that it is set in the Vietnam war and that Marlon Brando gives a blood-curdling performance as an army officer who has been left in charge of an isolated outpost a long way up river and has gone crazy. When the rescue party reaches him they discover that he is being treated by the locals as a kind of god-king, loved and feared and executing anyone who displeases him. The chaos of the Vietnam war clearly has a lot to do with his moral breakdown, but we are also led to believe that he has had some piercing insights into his own soul and the human capacity for evil.
