Heart of Darkness Books

Probably the dampest book I've ever read--humidity drips off the end of each line like a light mist in a heavy fog. More is left unsaid than is written on the page, and this is truly a classic even though there is too much left unsaid for me to rate it at the very top.

Favorite line: As Marlow cautiously pilots the steamboat up the river toward the inland station and its mysterious keeper Kurtz, his manager says "I authorize you to take all the risks." Marlow curtly snaps back "I refuse to take any."

On page 3, the narrator (not Marlow) tells us that "Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
This story is not typical. Its meaning isn't inside the text; rather, the text requires its meaning to be explicated outside in the world of symbols and signs. I recently used this text in a expository writing class focused mainly on teaching what, and not how to write (what to write when confronted with your own lack of desire to write). Conrad's text needs to be fitted into 19th century philosophy and especially epistemology. For a great essay see: Decentering "Heart of Darkness" by Perry Meisel. If you're not reading this text for a class (with a teacher versed in 19th century philosophy) or with the intent to look into the historical "narrative" that brings out the meaning of the text like a "glow brings out a haze", then don't bother.
I read this book quicky in about six hours, then spent the next 7 days going through 10 pages a day. That method seemed to work but those 10 pages took nearly 2 hours to read carefully. The result is a story so filled with symbolism that even reading it as a denounciation of colonialism or mperialism seems shallow! Highly recommended for disciplined reading!

Like most people, I was familiar with Heart of Darkness, both as an acclaimed work of literature and as the inspiration for the remarkable movie Apocolypse Now. For some reason, I recently decided to make an attempt at reading it, despite my concern that it was written at a level beyond my capacity to understand.

Upon receipt of the volume from Amazon, I was initially under the impression that I had mistakenly ordered the Cliff's Notes version of the work. I had no idea that the book was essentially a short story, easily readable in 2-3 hours.

Even more surprising, was the ease with which I was able to follow and understand the story, though admittedly written in a slightly dense prose. Perhaps this was due to having seen Apocolypse Now and being familiar with the broad outline of the story and having read other works of history on the Belgian Congo.

In any event, it was a decent story, filled with some beautifully descriptive language and imagery. I must say, however, that I was not bowled over. Steamship Captain pilots a ragged boat up the Congo, accompanied by colonial agents and support staff (cannibals and other natives) in an attempt to relieve a long stranded station agent (Kurtz) who has "gone native" and become the insane source of worship for the local natives. If you've seen Apocolypse Now, you know the story, just replace the Mekong with the Congo.

I go back to my first paragraph in which I related a concern over my ability to understand what is considered a classic work of literature. I fully understood it, but was perhaps not qualified to fully appreciate it.

Most of the lower rated reviews reflect the views of students, compelled to read the novel to pass a class who are proportionately resentful of it. I was one of those students once, but I found this to be a respite from the typical "politically correct"-anemic-emasculated Literat bilge one's forced fed ad nauseum in public schooling. Get the edition with The Secret Sharer and minus all the tartuffe commentaries, ect. Great story, but no one ought to be compelled to read it.

Joseph Conrad's book, "Heart of Darkness" is the ideal choice for any high school student choosing a novel from their class reading list. Being under 200 pages in length this book works with a student's busy loaded schedule, attention span and most of all grabs their attention. Overlooking the blatant racism implemented by most colonial nations during the rush for imperialism this book is accurate to the effects and general events which transpired during this period. The outlook and comments towards the African people by their colonial oppressors is mild compared with other novels written in the early 1900's. With all the description of the surroundings and events in this book, it drags you into its pages and putting it down becomes a struggle.

The amount of symbolism in this book is amazing and refers to all aspects of human life, greed, moral standings, duty and much more. Constant description and detail is the perfect tool to awaken the imagination and the creativity of the reader. Symbolism is dripping from every paragraph along with imagery concerning anything from the unknown, the overwhelming and clamping effect of the river, the dark abyss which represents the jungle, and the natives and their fierce and alien but intriguing actions. This novel, now over 100 years old, can safely be called a classic and an extremely interesting read for any age old enough to understand the effects of early imperialism.

In some ways this is a hard book to get into since it is set in a totally different culture from ours -rural England of the mid-nineteenth century. You would think that that is close enough in time to not be a problem. But to me the things like their courtship customs, or what is considered scandalous/honorable behavior, are really at a variance with the way we act today that I found it hard to relate to. Add to this some of the implausible melodrama and coincidences that make up the plot and I almost ended up putting down the book.

However I kept reading and in the end I thought it was an excellent story. This is because it illustrated a truth about life that I could empathize with. How a man through pride, anger, stubbornness and alcoholism could end up destroying his relationships with all of the people he is close to and in middle age end up being alienated from everyone who was important to him in his life. Since this story was written there have been millions of guys like Michael Henchard. The details of their lives are different, their endings may have been different. But there is an underlying truth that is the same. That aspect of the story is timeless.

In the novels of Thomas Hardy, tragedy can be an externalized force like Egdon Heath in THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE or it can be of the internalized sort, the kind that Michael Henchard brings on himself in THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. In either case, nature is unforgiving, a quality which is a given in any of Hardy's works. When tragedy is of the latter kind, then the protagonist is not unlike the doomed tragic hero from classical Greek drama wherein he is first seen as a great or simply a good man who suffers from a tragic flaw, the results of which drag him down so that by the end of the action, his state is so miserably pathetic that the reader/audience can do no more than shake their heads in sorrow at his downfall, that in another and less proud man need not have happened at all.

Michael Henchard is the post-Victorian man of mixed qualities who like Oedipus, commits a sin and then spends the rest of the book trying to make amends. His sin is maudlin self-pity. He allows his current debased financial position to lead him to drink, all the while blaming his wife and child. At an auction, he offers his family for the sale to the highest bidder. He ignores the warnings from those present that he is courting disaster. An unknown man offers the highest bid and off he goes, taking Henchard's wife and child with him. Hardy takes pains to place Henchard squarely in the middle of this somber farce. Hardy gives no name to the successful bidder nor does he allow the reader to note the wife's actions. She, surprisingly, remains silent, but weeping. Henchard, by contrast, is loud, crude, and obnoxious. He occupies central stage until the next chapter when he sobers up, is filled with remorse, and then tries to set things right. He fails and winds up the leading citizen of Casterbridge. The image of the drunken Henchard and the mayor Henchard are startlingly unlike. The latter is sober, industrious, and respectable, causing the reader to commiserate with him. But the tragedy of Henchard does not lie merely in a series of vain regrets. Just as he seems to undergo permanent rehabilitation of self, his ex-wife shows up again, with a new child from the now dead bidder. Hardy complicates the plot with his usual unwieldy complications. As a result, Henchard plunges again into the depths of despair; this time he shows that his old sins of false pride and egotism have returned with a vengeance. He tries to bankrupt his business partner Farfrae, for reasons purely of jealousy. It becomes progressively more difficult for the reader to maintain the same sympathy that they had earlier. Later, at the novel's close, Henchard is made to wander like a wounded Lear, and this alone partially elevates him back to his previous stature of a tragic figure. He, like Lear, dies repentant. From his death, the audience discovers that the essence of a tragic fall lies not so much in how much sympathy that protagonist garners during that fall but rather in how true to life his fall was. Michael Henchard was neither saint nor reprobate sinner. He was the Victorian Everyman with a mixture of goodness and mean-spiritedness, either of which could emerge under the right circumstances. At his fall, the reader saw that the "right" circumstances were sufficiently ordinary so that anyone of us might have done the same. This is the essence of the tragedy of THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.

Thomas Hardy has a reputation for writing bleak, sad stories. The Mayor happens to be my first Hardy read, and I can't tell you how saddening I found the overall tale.

Many points are made by Hardy: dealing with the past and its haunting effects; pride before the fall; and even the folly of mental inflexibility.

I couldn't shake the parallel of the King Saul/David story from the Bible while reading this. You have the powerful man who takes in an apprentice then becomes overcome with jealousy and envy as his apprentice eventually outshines him. And rather than putting his usurped life in perspective, allows his anger and envy to make matters much worse.

I saw Michael as a flawed man who is redeemed by his sense of duty and obligation.

I think the theme of duty to world versus self is important here. Michael's duty to his first family overrides his desire to be with his new girlfriend Lucetta. He probably would have been happier with Lucetta; but wouldn't we as the audience have seen him as selfish if he had chosen her instead of Susan? Both women were manipulative, one aggressively, one passively, so it probably didn't matter. But it does raise the question of how much of our personal happiness should be sacrificed for societal duties.

Donald Farfrae, the Scottish apprentice is put here purely to provide Michael Henchard with a foil. I don't feel he is developed at all, and is kind of dull, as is Elizabeth Jane.

There are character driven stories and plot-driven stories. And in plot-driven stories, you know that the characters' personalities or decision-making won't really matter in how things end. That's an aspect of Mayor...that some may find the most frustrating. You never could shake the feeling that destiny was unalterable. I, however, had no problem with it. It was a good ride.

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is a story about Michael Henchard attempts at redemption and the many sorrows, pain, and misery that comes with his decision to uphold his pride and name. To say that Henchard is the only character that suffers in this novel would be a misrepresentation; almost every character at some point suffers immensely in some trial of life, whether it is death of someone close, pain of separation, or the frustration of a relationship. For these reasons, this work is not a "light" read by any stretch of the imagination, and will probably test even the optimist's patience in getting through. Still, Hardy's story, the descriptions of the countryside and the characters' inner feelings, as well as the way he ties together every character in this book, is a remarkable feat and makes for a powerful read.

The story begins with Michael Henchard walking with his wife, Susan, to the fair as they cross the countryside. While there, in an act of drunkenness, Henchard sells his wife to a sailor, and seemingly sets in motion his irreversible bad fortune. Not being able to find his wife the next day, he makes an oath to not drink alcohol for 21 years, the exact amount of years he has lived. The novel then fast forwards 19 years to find Henchard the Mayor of Casterbridge, and a noteworthy man of respect. Susan finds him, marries him after forgiving him, but there are many secrets that both parties have and will have until the end of the novel. It seems that many of these secrets are the character's downfalls. Henchard, while Mayor of Casterbridge, meets a man named Donald Farfrae, who he comes to like and implores to stay in town; however, eventually he and Farfrae become bitter rivals in not only their business and society, but also in their relationship with Lucetta, a woman who had an affair with Henchard in the past.

Henchard's fallacy of character lay in his stubborn pride and his foolish belief that name and appearance is everything. He sometimes tries to create a façade, or cover up one sin with another secret or problem. When he tries to persuade Lucetta to marry him, so as to not destroy her name, he retorts: "But it is not by what is, in this life, but by what appears, that you are judged." He is a tragic individual who seems to not be able to change his views long enough to make something right occur; when something does go well, it is short lived. He even gets to a point where he connects himself with an ominous and unpreventable fate, at one point referring to himself as Cain. He never really heeds Elizabeth's attempts at love until very late in the novel when tragic occurrences seem to be set in motion.

Still, despite all his problems, and all his pride, he is a "likeable" character because he makes the effort at retribution and is sorrowful each time he gets hit with a dilemma or makes an unfavorable decision. He has the willingness and conscience to try to amend his deficiencies, but, in the end, he just makes too many mistakes, and has too much pride to reverse his fortunes.

Michael Henchard, a down-on-his-luck, unemployed hay trusser, succumbs to the siren call of alcohol at a country fair. Subconsciously feeling his wife, Susan, is holding him back from success in this world, he awakes to sobriety the next morning and realizes that, in a foolish fit of pique, he has auctioned her and his daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, off to a sailor. Despite his frantic efforts to find them, they have disappeared. Ravaged with guilt over his selfish, impulsive act, he swears he will not take another drink for twenty-one years.

Whether his wife was indeed one of Henchard's problems is left for the reader to ponder as Henchard moves to Casterbridge, prospers wildly in business and eventually becomes the town's leading citizen and mayor. Henchard's wheel of fortune, however, begins to spin on a wobbly axle as Donald Farfrae, an enterprising young Scot travelling to seek his fortune, enters his employ as the manager of his business. At the same time, Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, re-enter Henchard's life believing that Michael Newson, the sailor who had purchased them some nineteen years earlier, has perished at sea. Henchard's life truly begins to come apart when Lucetta Templeman, a former lover, also moves to Casterbridge and, ashamed of her past romantic entanglement with Henchard, seeks to hold him to his promise of marriage!

Hardy raises many issues but, not expressing his own opinion through an unequivocal direction in the story's plot line, seems content to leave these issues as topics for sober analysis by his readers. Hardy questions the conflict between the merits of tradition vs modernization. There is the enormous irony that Henchard's success as a business person seems clearly attributable in part to his tee-totalling vow but is founded upon the five guineas seed capital raised through the auction of his wife and daughter! Henchard seems to epitomize the constant personal conflicts we all face between decisiveness and strength of character as opposed to impulsiveness and stubborn bullheaded intransigence! One wonders whether Lucetta is flighty, coquettish, thoughtless and selfish or is she an early manifestation of modern woman sadly out of time and years ahead of the ladies around her? Is Farfrae to be admired or scorned for his meteoric rise to power in Casterbridge and his complete devastation of Henchard's place among his peers?

Perhaps the most powerful moment of the entire novel comes with the discovery of Henchard's will and his words directing that the world leave him to rest in forgotten isolation and that no person mark or mourn his passing in any fashion. Once again, we are left to decide for ourselves whether Henchard's life should be pitied, forgiven, admired or looked upon with scorn and disgust.

To the readers of the day, "The Mayor of Casterbridge" would have been perceived as a darkly pessimistic tragedy that might have evoked emotions akin to those raised by Shakespeare's "Hamlet" or Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex". A classic worthy of the term, "The Mayor of Casterbridge", certainly never cheerful or uplifting, is however many, many things - compelling, moving, disturbing, thought-provoking and poignant. Above all, it is worthy of being read and enjoyed by any lover of classic 19th century British Literature.

Paul Weiss

Heart of Darkness is encapsulated in a time of human history when exploitation, murder and mayhem was brought onto Africa and its peoples by besotted power-hungry brutally callous buccaneering white men from Europe. The riches of Africa were raped and plundered and its peoples humiliated, murdered, displaced and treated as animals. Africa was butchered like a wild animal and the carcass divided amongst the colonial powers.

Marlow, the narrator, during that sad epoch, tells his story of a mission to the Congo to pilot a steamboat on the Congo River for `the Company'. On arrival at the decrepit sham of a Central Station on the River where suspicion and decay and corruption hangs over everything Marlow learned that a very important trading station was in jeopardy and that it's chief, Mr. Kurtz was ill at a deserted trading post 300 miles down stream.

The manager of the Central Station, a sordid, greedy, cruel and bloated insecure white man live a life of uncertainty amongst filth and decaying bodies of chained and starving indigenous black people and idle suspicious white workers. And Kurtz is piped to succeed him. And he hates Kurtz with a vengeance. And Kurtz hates and despises him.

Kurtz a man "of greatness, of generous mind, of noble heart, a great musician, and a man of magnificent eloquence" is a man of great influence with the Council in Europe. Kurtz asked to be sent to the outpost. His self declared mission "each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course, but also humanizing, improving, instructing"

Kurtz send large hoards of ivory to the Central Station with his assistant and returned alone in a dugout canoe to his trading post. And Kurtz disappeared for nine months; wild rumors reached the Central Station; and the ivory from Kurtz dries up to the consternation of the manager of the Central Station.

Going up the river to Kurtz's trading post Marlow experienced the great silence and spookiness of the impenetrable tropical rainforest and the boat followed by angry indigenous people hiding in the thickets. Finding Kurtz, metamorphose has happened, the refined man turned into a maniac, adoring his fence posts with black, dried human heads. The wilderness has found him and crept into his being. His weary brain was haunted by shadowy images - images of wealth and fame - and turbulent angst tormented his soul. He transformed into a heart of darkness. He hoarded all the ivory he could find and claim it as his; he raised an impi of naked spear carrying indigenous black men lead by a black warrior woman and he died lonely and frightened and his body was slid into the turbulent waters of the Congo River.

Set in the Belgian Congo during the 19th century Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, is a journey to the darkest corners of the wilderness and the human heart. The story is told by Marlow, a sailor, who journeys to the Congo to captain a river steamer and ends up on a expedition to save an extrodinary ivory trader by the name of Mr. Kurtz.

Throughout this journey he encounters the raw brutality of colonialism in all its horror and greed. Conrad brings the reader to the frontier where men do savage things all for the spoils of conquest. This is in sharp contrast with other African adventure classics, such as King Solomon's Mines, which take a much more amiable view of the conquest of Africa.

Conrad shows all this barbarism with vivid imagery. His description of the Congo wilderness brings it life with all the mystery and majesty it is due. Conrad's prose is magnificent; you feel like you are at Marlow's side throughout the whole story. However anyone thinking this is a fast paced thriller is mistaken. It plot moves at a leisurely pace and isn't as rushed as novels today.

Another one of the beauties of this book is its re-readability. I first read it through without reading the introduction and I am glad I did. It let me interperet the meaning of the book without anyone else's influences and when I read the introduction at the end I found that there was a myraid of other themes that could be drawn from the story that I had not thought of. I am now reading it a second time in a new light. I suggest anyone reading it the first time to skip the intro and the footnotes until you've read it once. It will definetly make it a more enjoyable read.

Not that it is not already an excellent book. Heart of Darkness is a literature masterpiece that shows the raw repungent character of colonialism and human nature with haunting power.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

Being that it is only about 90 pages long, I was able to finish this story in one afternoon. It is easy to see why Whites and Blacks get such different messages from the book.

The reader is encouraged, throughout the story, to be sympathetic to the White characters. Since most Whites, even in the 21st century, have yet to shed their racist garments, they will naturally emphathize with the plight of these poor White guys who, unfortunately, are "forced" to put up with the strangeness of this strange land in order to steal the resources from that land's inhabitants. After all, White guys are having to put up with similar trials even today in order to steal the resources from, yeah, that's right, the same country, the Congo. Oh, pity those poor French military advisors who are forced to go into the "Heart of Darkness" to keep the natives fighting each other, to make sure they don't turn on the real theives of their abundant mineral resources. The horror! The horror!

By contrast, Conrad's treatment of his black characters is non-existent. They are soul-less beasts of burden. Conrad doesn't even bother to give them names. They are just referred to as niggers. When they are described as being beaten, or left alone to die, or forced to work on Marlow's ship for over a month with no food except rotten hippo meat (Marlow's only concern was that the smell of the rotted meat was annoying the White guys), Conrad writes of these incidents with no more sympathy than what you would expect from a description of an ant being stepped on by our poor embattled protagonist. Only a Black fool would not be offended by Conrad's work and Barak Obama is anything but that.

To get some idea of just how bad Conrad's character development is, compare it to that of one of his contemporaries who actually had talent ... Mark Twain. It is a sign of Twain's genius that he could suck Whites in by using the word "nigger", but at the same time get them to see his black characters as human beings. His black characters had names, families, they could even feel love and pain. Just like White people. Imagine that.

The story is that of a group of men aboard the Nellie, among them the anonymous narrator, who are told Marlow's experience in the Congo in the 1890s. Marlow's career, like Conrad's, spans an important period in the history of relations between Europe and Africa. The author's purpose is to show that the "civilising" mission actually reveals the "darkness" at its own heart instead of bringing light into the darkness as it claims.
In 1890 Conrad was appointed to the Congo by the Societe Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce and in June that year he reached Kinshasa, the Central Station in "Heart of Darkness". But soon the idealised realities of a boy's dreams were replaced by "the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration" (in "Last Essays").
Thus Marlow's journey to the Congo becomes a moral journey in which he confronts the workings of colonialism and his account is a frame-tale with inset stories, a so-called "oblique narration" - a tale within another tale. The darkness of Marlow's expedition is enhanced by the fact that his quest for Kurz contains repeated references to the latter's "eloquence" and "gift of expression" thus promising to articulate the solution to the moral and philosophical problems that the journey has created. Marlow's encounter with Kurz is a bitter disappointment with its "desolate exclamations, shrugs, hints ending in sighs".
Although Conrad shows the criminality of inefficiency and selfishness of Europeans when dealing with the civilising work of Africa, the narrative is not gloomy. Kurz himself is merely a victim of the discourse of imperialism and his break-up shows how damaging it is for both Africans and Europeans.
Another aspect in Conrad's novel is the stereotypical representation of women and the exclusion of the female reader. This is shown in Kurz's last words before dying: "The horror! The horror!" which refer to his Intended!

This is an interesting story but it reads like an unfinished story. When Tayler's guide Desi falls ill the trip comes to a screeching halt. Was Desi really ill or was he merely demoralized and if so why? Or was he faking illness(he springs right back as soon as he boards the barge)? No matter. Did the author really have no choice but to abandon his quest after the first sign of trouble and danger - real or perceived? Couldn't he have procured a substitute guide at one of numerous riverine villages or a town? Didn't Henry Morton Stanley warn him enough of the dangers he would face? Was the pull of Tatyana and the crisp air of Moscow so irresistible after so many days of heat, humidity, bugs and hostilities? I was deeply disappointed at the abrupt end to the story. It is one thing for Tayler to paddle down the Congo river or any river on earth but as a reader I expected more after having followed him over 250 pages of his travelogue. Was the story worth writing? Obviously the answer to this question is 'yes' - the book is written. Was it worth reading? Here the answer is also affirmative. There is much to be gleaned from his encounters with the army, security, police and other forms of thuggery for anyone crazy enough to retrace his steps or even go beyond and actually complete it - in person. His description of the beach scene when he first arrives in Kinshasa is memorable if gut-wrenching. There is much to ponder about the glimpse of the welcome and the abundance of hostilities. Is the authhor exaggerating the latter to justify abandoning what he set out to do? And was he too paranoid to see much of the former? If nothing else the book shows the anxiety and trepidation that will surely visit a mere mortal traveler off the beaten path and the toll they take on one's psyche.
Tayler's quest for traveling the length of the river both up and down is no doubt greatly facilitated by an army officer whose motives in lending him help remain mysterious. Whatever the motives, such help may have come at a price even when no money is demanded. Left to his own device Taylor may have been more motivated to reach out and connect with the fellow travelers on the way up the Congo river from whom he may have gotten a better sence of what to expect and how to prepare himself for his trip down.

Tayler's subtitle puts it in perspective.

This is the story of a modern traveler taking on a part of the Congo River in recent times, the bigger story is its comparison with Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness". Conrad's 1890's short novel sets the stage for Tayler's update of conditions in equatorial Congo. Without Conrad's work, Tayler's book is merely an interesting travel adventure. If Tayler makes you uneasy, Conrad will make you gasp.

Tayler makes modern day adventure to liven up a mundane existence seem almost reachable. Who doesn't fantasize about swashbuckling through adventuresome circumstances when they're sitting at their desk and doing their routine day-to-day life.

Tayler picked up and left everything to risk his own life to wake himself up, a somewhat romantic notion that only rich westerners can do. It's not until the end that he realizes that his own "rich boy" fantasies jeoporadized and compromised the native Congolese/Zairese in which he depended on for his safety. I didn't feel sorry for the author at all when he would get upset and yell at his guide Desi. Desi, who although somewhat annoying with his sermons, did save Tayler from being killed numerous times.

The poverty and everyday struggle that the Africans face in the Congo make Tayler's adventure besmirch of elitism and colonialism. The everyday descriptions of the people themselves make the book intense and rich, Tayler's adventure is secondary.

I also wondered why the author was so out of shape, you would think that he would have trained before embarking on such a physical journey... maybe if he wasn't so sluggish he actually could have accomplished his task rather than complain about aching joints so much and abort his trip halfway...

(Salt Lake City is one of the places Desi is trying to ennunciate)

If you can't afford a trip to the Congo, this book is the next best thing. Tayler's descriptions are excellent, and they combine just the right measures of knowledge and fascinated innocence. What struck me most was how little Brazzaville had changed in the ten years since I lived there.

It is not often that one has the opportunity to enjoy an excellent book, and then, have the pleasure to actually meet the author. So be it: Jeffrey Tayler is currently my houseguest in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, where he began the arduous journey which resulted in "Facing the Congo" in 1995. The city has survived the devastation of civil war, 1997-2001, and is flourishing once again thanks to bountiful natural resources of timber, minerals and oil. Let's hope this will be enough to inspire Jeffrey to reprise his adventure on the Congo River and perhaps to share once again his experiences with a loyal following. A must read, not only for diplomats, travellers or tourists to the Central African region, but for the armchair "explorer" as well.

Very complex and thought provoking, quite powerful and poignant. Excellent uses of symbols and motifs. I appreciate the value and importance of this book (probably 4 stars for this) and I definitely think everybody shoud read it , but I can't say I enjoyed reading it.

That is what Rossini reputedly said about the music of Richard Wagner, and a similar sentiment might be applicable to this novella. Wait--I take it back--not "awful"...but certainly...ponderous. Prolix. Demanding and uncompromising--in a way which is not really warranted, not perhaps necessary, but the author's prerogative nonetheless.

If you throw it away after a couple pages, I understand. However, unlike Henry James's The Turn of the Screw--which is gussied-up, ain't-I-a-weighty-writer? crap--Heart of Darkness is a true masterwork, and if you GET THROUGH IT, you'll come across some excellent stuff.

And at only seventy-two pages, you should manage.

Conrad, despite his unconcern for his readers' patience, DOES know how to create a classic character. Kurtz is such a one...and the suspense that builds over the course of the narrative makes the reader anticipate greatly his introduction. You're also left wanting more (and, when it's all over, feeling a bit short-changed), an attribute shared by other all-time classic figures such as Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves the butler, and Hannibal Lecter (before Thomas Harris sold him down the river).

The MLA claims that Heart of Darkness is the sixty-seventh best novel(la) of the 20th century (despite its complete and total 19th century tone, style, and atmosphere), and I'll go along with that. It's a much more significant contribution to literature than an impostor-work such as On the Road (ranked #55), but it may, however, suffer in the rankings due to its brevity.

My advice: drink some Mountain Dew, hunker down for a couple hours, and get this book under the belt.

An excellent work on the role of the imperial European forces in the shaping of the political and economic spheres in Asia and Africa around the turning of the previous century. Since these forces have been instrumental in the determination of the present day attitudes toward western powers, they must be studied carefully help in overcoming the negative aspects of what has resulted.

I picked up Heart of Darkness because I thought Apocalypse Now (not the Redux, which sucks) was a really good movie. As it turns out, there's little in common between the two.

The story concerns Marlow, an Englishman, who takes a job ferrying ivory down a river in Africa. He becomes interested in Kurtz, another trader who has set himself up as a god over the tribes in this area.

Heart of Darkness, again, has been elevated to that divine status of "English literature." The same people who have promoted it thus have also attempted to explain away the novel's flagrant racism, although I don't know how that would be possible. How many English professors would be up a creek (you know which creek) if everybody suddenly figured out that authors like Conrad are overrated?

Like The Secret Sharer, Heart of Darkness is boring and difficult to read. Conrad is one of those who liked sentences the size of paragraphs and paragraphs that went on for a page or more. Often, given his penchant for changing topics mid-paragraph, I did not see why he used half the paragraph breaks he did. The boringness of the novel is compounded by the Marlow's rambling narrative. Certainly, this helps define the personality of the character, but it certainly doesn't help the book's readability.

Conrad presents the whole story as told as narrative by the main character after everything has taken place. Here, glaringly, Conrad's style doesn't work. "The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur." Obviously, people write like this, but nobody ever talked like this. You tell a story to an audience like this and every last one of them will be asleep.

Conrad's work is highly symbolic. Far be it from me to say he was not a talented writer. But I think he, as well as those who cling to his coattails, have missed this: you can go to far with symbolism, and most any other literary device, and absolutely kill the story. While Conrad was busy creating vividly-descriptive sentences and cathedrals of paragraphs, the story fell by the wayside, and nobody went back for it.

This is my problem. I don't want to see word pictures of nothing, no matter how lovely those pictures might be. Just tell me a story. If you can do both at once, so much the better. But if you're only going to have one, this is the wrong one to have.

NOT RECOMMENDED

I was motivated to re-visit Conrad's early masterpiece by Sebald's Walk in Suffolk, which contains a bio chapter on Conrad with emphasis on his Congo experience, which was a traumatic one. Conrad had taken up the job of a skipper of a river steamboat, but he quit after a short time, in disgust with the colonial practices of the Belgians and their crude exploitation methods.
Marlow is Conrad's alter ego here, a captain who tells his story to some other guests at a dinner party. The party takes place on a ship in the Thames estuary around the turn of the 19th century. An initial narrator gives us the frame of the five men coming together for a chat and a drink and dinner. Marlow then takes over and tells us 'one of his inconsequential stories', as the introducer expects with some sarcasm: how he got the Congo job and went there with curiosity. He is appalled from the start by the crude colonialist violence that he observes on the African West Coast and then in the Congo territory itself, and by the raw greed of the colonialists. Kurtz of course, the main protagonist of Marlow's tale, who has not much of a 'life' role to play in the story, stands for the fallen white man, the one whose character cracked and who gave in to temptations and demons, his personal ones and from the world around him. He had the reputation of being a superior specimen, a man with morality and efficiency. The 'heart of darkness' is an ambiguous place and title. It can mean the center of the unknown inner Africa, but it also means the soul of the fallen man.(Kurtz is best known with the face of Marlon Brando and the whispered words: the horror! the horror! But Apocalypse Now transformed the story from Congo colonialism into Indochina war cruelty.)
Marlow's attitude is ambiguous, he thinks like a benevolent white man with an essentially racist attitude himself, but with a more 'humane' approach. He is realistic about imperialism: the conquest of the earth means mostly the taking it away from those who have a different complexion and flatter noses. He even takes history with a broader sweep: looking over the Thames at sunset towards the 'monster' city he is reminded of the times when this was a dark place for the invading Roman army.
The book is written in a remarkably opaque language. One struggles with every single sentence just to follow the story line. This is unfortunate, I am sure a more straightforward narrative technique would have opened a broader audience for the subject.
Conrad was a man who produced stunning visual effects of the mind with his inventions, but he was not a chief engineer of narrative simplicity. If one is looking for a good straightforward narrative, this is not it. If one is willing to take up the struggle, one is rewarded though. One has to wrestle meaning out of his writing, it is not a walk in the park. The style is highly contextual, every sentence implies worlds and assumes you know which ones. At the same time, he is also able to come up with pretty gems of sentences like when Marlow describes his steamboat: she rang under my feet like an empty biscuit tin, but she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape.
In line with the frame narrator's low expectations for Marlow's story, half of the audience is asleep by half way. I was not.

My book had not arrived in the time period stated and I contacted the seller and received no answer as of yet.

I was forced to reread this book after purchasing the more recent "King Leopold's Ghost," which I have also reviewed.

Even though Conrad's book was a novel based loosely on events he, or other had witnessed, the events in "King Leopold's Ghost" were not fiction at all, but the "real modern day deal."

It was this novel that was the first to expose the true horrors of European colonialism on the African continent. It tells the story of a supremely successful collector of Elephant tusks, which were being taken from the Belgian Congo for the purpose of trading them on the world market for ivory. Kurz's business was successful only because of the brutality and immorality of his techniques: He swindled, stole and killed Africans in the hundreds if not the thousands to stay ahead of the competition. And just as happened a generation later, by the diminutive and brutal Belgian King, no one asked any questions about his brutal techniques.

The phrase" The Heart of Darkness," referring to the heart of the white colonists, came to replace the phrase "darkest Africa" as a result of this novel. Its beauty lies in Conrad's failed attempt to re-humanize Kurtz as a symbolic image of redemption in the name of all the white colonists that had heaped carnage upon Africa.

But the author's efforts fell short both in the novel and in reality because in Conrad's hands, Kurtz was turned into "a less than ideal moral man." He became a man who learned to come to grips with the evil he had spawn, by discovering that he was not an inherently wicked man, but one who was god-fearing and capable of the "natural moral superiority" that the white man was supposed to have over the more savage Africans. The question of which man was the more savage was left "hanging in the air" in the novel.

Unless you are white, turning to "the white man's religion" where moral superiority is still claimed by fiat is not much redemption. But at least it is something. Apparently the novel did not have the desired moral effect in reality either, as history can attest. It may in fact well have had just the opposite effect: as the Belgians repeated the same ghastly and brutal experiment a generation later, only this time with diamonds instead of ivory. Despite all this, and the goriness of the content, it is still a powerfully told story by a master of his craft.

Five Stars

Heart of Darkness is an incredible Novella. Everyone Should read it. This review is not critical of the story, but of the publisher.

I own this particular edition of the book. It is a joke. The publisher, Faliquarian, shouldnt have been given a license to print this book. It is rife with typos, and wierd symbold that don't make any sense.

For example, where in the origonal story Conrad uses the words "...etc. etc..." to end a sentence, this copy of HoD prints it as "...&c. &c..." Yes, those are "&" symbols. It doesn't make sense to me either.

And in other instances where Conrad uses italicyzed words to emphasize something, this copy of the book uses...an underscore? So when COnrad emphasizes the word "you" this publisher prints it as "you_".

I sware I can't belive I paid for this.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

Conrad's novella contains an almost endless fount of symbolic allusions. One of the most important occurs early in the story and ties the symbolism of darkness, finitude, the mystery of the labyrinth and death to the images of the lunar cycle, the tide, yarn and narrative. "The yarns of seaman have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical [...], and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." Conrad appears to be indicating that the seaman is closer to the "State of Nature" because of his intimate relationship with this primal cycle of the tide (eternal recurrence). Melville certainly indicates as much in Moby-Dick. The natural rhythm of the sea forces the seaman into greater harmony with nature thus enabling him to see more clearly the natural state of man--helping him to see into the darkness. Religious rituals are very often tied to the cycle of the moon. For example, Easter is always on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The moon represents death and rebirth because it is born, grows, declines and dies, only to be reborn. Each day the moon is killed by the sun, the light. But the light of the sun only temporarily illuminates the darkness, i.e. darkness (ignorance) is the more natural state. Mythologically the animal associated with the sun is the lion, whose golden face resembles the sun; the animal associated with the moon is the bull, whose horns represent the horns of the moon. Thus we have the many references to the sacrifice of the bull in almost all primitive religions, imitating the death of the moon. The Minotaur is conspicuously brought to mind at the beginning of Plato's Phaedo 58a9-b3 in relation to Socrates, death and sacrifice. The lion's roar scatters the horned beasts of the prairie, imitating the power of the sun's light to scatter darkness. In this passage Conrad seems to be pointing out that some things are only visible at night, in the dark as it were. Furthermore these things can have a higher degree of reality than those made visible in the sunlight. The heart of things is shrouded in darkness. Might Conrad's account of light enveloped in darkness be a dramatic image of something like Socratic knowledge of ignorance? The entire tale can be read as a story of how nature is hidden in the deep recesses of the political community (civilization). But the story is told in Schopenhauerian/Nietzschean rather than Platonic language. We have an allegory of the recognition of the Mystery of Being as it manifests itself within the hierarchy of human souls or psyches. Of course in modernity there is not much of a hierarchy, and the souls of Conrad's Westerners all seem to be equally base. The closest thing we have in Conrad's tale to a philosopher is Marlow (we don't know enough about the frame narrator to say one way or the other, i.e. with him we are left in the dark), who is really more of a "neutral" observer. But Marlow clearly represents the harmonization of light and dark. We must look beyond Marlow--to his imitation of the Buddha--to see that knowledge of ignorance is the actualization of the cosmic State of Nature in the soul of man, which explains the soteric effects of philosophy and does so in way that also explains how these soteric effects transcend the "local" soteriology necessary to political community; i.e. it refers us to the necessity of religion to community politically and explains the tension between the soteric effects of philosophy in the elevated individual's soul in contrast with the soteriological needs of nonphilosophic souls. There are those unable to comprehend, unable to accept the truth into their soul without it destroying them. Thus Kurtz, even though he is exceptional (to borrow a Nietzschean term), is not a philosopher--he had "no restraint." The community must conceal the truth about darkness by shining a man-made light on it (the myth of cultural progress out of darkness into the light), you might say. Direct contact with the "light of truth" would destroy the community (philosophy is dangerous); for that light also contains within it the truth about cosmic darkness (staring directly into the light of the sun causes blindness or reabsorption into darkness). Plato's Good is not good for everyone, as Plato and especially Socrates knew all too well. Thus Marlow as the Buddha (the enlightened and definitely restrained one), having been to the East, removed from Western society and returned as the neutral observer. Or so Conrad seems to be saying. But what is clearly there to be discerned by the discerning reader is that the narrative structure of the story dramatically images a path to the State of Nature in the dark recesses of the psyche. The person with the capacity for such levels of discernment would likely experience this psychological journey as an ascent (i.e. a transcendence of the narrow and bodily concerns of the political community via asceticism=ascent), out of the cave, to the light of nature through philosophic thought; whereas the person who lacks the philosopher's intellectual capacities and inborn asceticism experiences the path to nature (knowledge of ignorance or light enveloped by darkness) as a descent or a return to savagery.

My interpretation may now be densely summarized in the following terms. The explanation of Conrad's quasi-religious imagery of the transformation of the civilized man to the uncivilized brute in the person of Kurtz fits like a mask of resignation and decline over the face of Western civilization. Resignation is personified by Marlow the neutral observer who is powerless to effect a reversal or even stop the decline of a single devolute in the person Kurtz. Thus Marlow's knowledge can save him but not his culture ("Solitude is the involution of the forces of nature, as these forces have fulfilled their purpose and returned to the void; it is the power of consciousness turning back upon itself" Patanjali, Yogasutra 4.34.); his civilization's cycle has run its course, like the cycle of the moon. (T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" is an explicit poetic imitation of Conrad's prose allegory.)

An impressive and delightful read and an awesome work by a world-class scholar-author and educator. It is as comprehensive and thorough a critical work as we are likely to find anywhere, on any work of fiction, whether or not canonical. I'm a reader who feasts on literary and scholary criticism. Showing quite a bit of his lively mind and personality at work, Firchow's study of Heart of Darkness is a humbling and joyous reading experience.

Heart of Darkness has become a politically controversial book bringing the issue of racism into the foreground. Firchow counters the accusations of racism that have been made and defends his opinion of Conrad's book with solid arguments.

Much has been said on the subject of colonial racism, and this still leaves a bitter tang in the throats of most historicially learned people. Still, we don't need this book. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is placed in the context of his time, and even when skimming the novell, one get the image that it is an attack on the imperialism of that time. Firchow goes after the wrong novell.

The quality of this recording leaves something to be desired. It sounds like it was done in the 1950's and the speaker's voice is high-pitched, twangy and practically inaudible at times. Aside from this, Conrad's prose is beautiful and incredibly moving and his descriptions of the depths of the African jumgle are incomparable.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

I am glad finally there is a audio play available for this time-honored sea story by Joseph Conrad. Although the narrative has been omitted in this production, the essence and the mood have well kept and best of all, the sound quality is still in top form even though it was produced in the fifties. This is really a vintage radio play at its best, I am sure it will delight fans of the golden age of radio.

I have not heard this recording, and cannot comment on the version of Heart of Darkness... but The Investigator is an absolute classic not to miss, whatever the recording quality: it satirizes the McCarthy/HUAC hearings brilliantly, with funny and memorable dialog. Not to be missed by fans of classic radio, lovers of good satire, or anyone interested in the period of the hearings.

V:tVA has been a long-awaited chapter in the World of Darkness story. It's a brilliant concept, but somewhat lacking in execution. Albeit, my opinion is biased, for I favor the older supplements rather than these newer ones. But it is a bias on the basis of product quality, of which the revised editions of thw World of Darkness games have begun to lack.

The book itself is rather straightforward in its design and execution of Vampire in a Victorian setting. It is a sparse read, even if laced with provocative enough detail to encourage your own research forthwith. Still, for anyone with an interest in the Victorian age as a setting for Vampire, this is an excellent primer, especially with those with little time or inclination to engage in personal research. It is comprehensive, thorough, and provides a snapshot of the Kindred in an age past.

When one stops considering its merits, a few flaws become obvious. The art, for one matter, is rather bland and even vague in places- witness one Guy Davis. His work summarily detracts from the piece, and the task of realizing the Dark Victorian age is thus thrust upon the remainder of the artistic staff. Otherwise, the art is excellent, if monotone (yet not entirely inappropriate, given the material and setting). The tone of the narrative is also somewhat pedantic in places (particularly, the in-character dialogue), demonstrating the 'gother-than-thou' attitude prevalent among the subculture.

Congratulations, White Wolf, on another just-above-mediocre product. Were you to invest a little more time into writing a guide to literary and artistic achievement, instead of pandering to Azrael Abyss and his ilk, this would truly be a sourcebook 'for the ages.' A true classic has been tainted by commercialism, a sad testament to the American method of publication.

WW has for many years provided historical settings for its games. Namely, Dark Ages for vampire and other games, this setting takes vampire to its roots in the gothic genre. Of all the historical settings, the gothic era provides the most for the avid roleplaying enthusiast. This is not a setting for power gamers, rather it is a finely developed melieu for sophisticated storytelling and characterization. Of all the WW supplements (this book requires you to have the Vampire: the masquerade core rulebook), victorian age vampire will delight those players that can appreciate the gothic era and its influence on the vampire as metaphor.