The Free World - second hand

Few literary works have achieved the sustained, unflinching pessimism of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's haunting tale of one man's journey into the African subcontinent. One new novel that can justly make that claim is The Catastrophist, by the talented Irish writer/activist Ronan Bennett. Here, Conrad's classic tale is transmogrified by a century of irony, Westernization, and a tip of the hat to Graham Greene and John le Carré. Benett's Marlow is James Gillespie, an Irish historian turned novelist who travels to the Congo in 1959. Set against the death throes of the age of imperialism, the new nation's violent struggle for independence from Belgium provides ample opportunity for Gillespie to explore the dark territory of political and emotional engagement.

Gillespie's Kurtz, the figure who draws him to the Congo and whose maddening attachment to the place both fascinates and repulses him, is Inès, a fiery Italian journalist, who pens fiercely pro-Congolese articles for a radical newspaper. Inès and Gillespie met in London at the house of Gillespie's publisher, and soon after, were heading to Ireland for a romantic getaway. Inès was smitten instantly ("I am already loving you" she whispers as they first make love), but Gillespie, considerably less headstrong, was slower to recognize his feelings. Following Inès to Léopoldville (Kinshasa), the Congolese capital, was his emotional plunge, his gesture toward commitment. But soon after his arrival, Gillespie realizes that he has been displaced from Inès's attentions by her devotion to Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic Congolese independence leader. Gillespie, on the other hand, is incapable of viewing the disorganized independence movement as anything more than an unfortunate farce; nor does he sympathize with the Belgians in Léopoldville, who live in cloistered luxury, walled off from the cité indigène -- "where the blacks live" -- by well-patrolled walls and their own willful obliviousness.