The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Liz Headleand has got round to it at last. She has been avoiding it for as long as possible, but evasion no longer seems possible. She is forcing herself to read Conrad’s Victory.

It would not be fair to say that she is hating every word of it, but she is not deriving much pleasure from it either. She has never liked Conrad. Twice she has made herself read Heart of Darkness, and she still has no idea, on the simplest level, of its plot. What actually happens in it? Who is going where, and why? She never discovered.

Victory is easier going, but it is not easy. Her attention had been redirected to it by a spirited correspondence in The London Review of Books about Conrad’s alleged racism, and she has decided that for Stephen’s sake she must make herself look at the evidence. And there is plenty here. I mean, says Liz to herself, one simply doesn’t speak, these days, of enormous buck niggers or chaps with flat noses and wide, baboon-like nostrils. It isn’t done. One does not refer to the Chinese as chinks either. And it’s no good arguing that Conrad’s just imitating the language of simple sea-faring folk. The enormous buck nigger comes in his own revised 1920 introduction, along with a lot of (in Liz’s view) pointlessly portentous and high-flowing Conradian language.

The portrait of the disgusting, fat, thick-lipped, chestnut-bearded Teutonic hotel manager Schomberg intrigues her, but she is puzzled to find that the hotel in question, from which Heyst abducts the lady from the ladies’ orchestra, is not in Bangkok, as she had supposed, but in Surabaya, Java. She had been sure that Stephen’s notes had referred to a hotel in Bangkok.

But Alan had been right, Victory is the one with the Caliban figure, the hairy ape from the Amazon, he of the baboon-like nostrils. Liz reads on with revulsion, as Conrad mocks and torments his poor savage diamond-hunting Yahoo. She thinks with tenderness of sweet Simon Grunewald and his head-hunters. She winces as she reads the scene in which the pock-marked green-eyed Martin Ricardo hits the ape-man on the head with a heavy piece of wood. The violence both of the language and the action is extreme. How can the gentle Stephen have admired this sort of stuff?

And she finds the chronology confusing. What is the point of all this skipping about from one time scale to another? Is it incompetence or ingenuity? And if it is ingenuity, what is Conrad being ingenious about? Liz likes to know where she is in a novel. She likes a novel that begins at the beginning and moves inexorably to its end. She does not like confusion for its own sake. There is plenty of confusion in real life, without inventing more of it.

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