Programming note: Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll be here with the latest episode of my Serenade Radio weekend music show, On the Town. It starts at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Thank you for your continuing comments upon our summer audio entertainment in Tales for Our Time. Fraser, a Steyn Clubber from East Anglia, is enjoying it so far:
Literature of the type read by MS in TfoT gives us a great sense of the world. Heart of Darkness is a prime example; not only those extended passages where the characters glide into the dark heart of the world (the sequence where a gun boat fires randomly into the Congolese shore is truly exceptional, (particularly as read by MS) but the internal landscapes by which Conrad was so imprisoned and, indeed, which so horrified him.
I really like Mark Steyn's reading. He is a master of the barely discernible pause which wrests so much meaning from the text. Moreover, there is a predominant tone of foreboding and anticipatory regret or baleful acceptance to his voice. Tremendous.
So with this reading I for one get to enjoy once again Conrad as the supreme master of the abstract noun in the world of English writing ('in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance', 'benign immensity of unstained light' - if ever there was a highly idiosyncratic and distinctive way of structuring a sentence in the English language it was Conrad's and not remotely English of course!).
Three decades ago I made a pilgrimage to Conrad's grave on a tupperware early October day in Canterbury Cemetery, Kent. The grave, in a far, unremarkable corner of the location, was barely noticeable, even faintly unkempt. Given the sheer enduring greatness of the man it did not seem, at first, at all fitting. Years later, I realised that, actually, it was a way better memorial in all its gloriously English understatement.
In my book this is a quintessential and brilliant Tale for our Time. So thanks Mark Steyn.
Thank you, Fraser. I'm grateful for your kind words, although I'm not sure they're all merited. That said, welcome to Part Eight of Heart of Darkness. In tonight's episode, our protagonist is beginning to wonder if his cannibal crew aren't getting a little peckish:
I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—had no inherited experience to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live. Certainly they had brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which couldn't have lasted very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn't, in the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really a case of legitimate self-defence. You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
But, if the hippo's been thrown into the Congo, what other meat does that leave for the cannibals? To enjoy Part Eight of Heart of Darkness, members of The Mark Steyn Club should simply click here and log-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
If you've yet to hear any of our Tales for Our Time, you can do so by joining the Steyn Club. For more details, see here. And please join me on Saturday for Part Nine of Heart of Darkness.
