Stygian Verbiage

Saturday, 21th August, Semliki Time: 7:43pm

Well, you know, I am just yonked. As we lost a week of time in Kampala, Alex and I both have data worries and, as Alex has to map an entire river, we spent a very long day trudging through water measuring out clay deposits with a spool of cotton. The day just didn’t seem to end, and I estimated that our progress though the clay deposits was around about 200km every 15 minutes. By the end we were most flushed. I got ghastly revenge, however, by asking her to help me do my “fly test” for sugar, and we both sat for two hours watching flies land on strips of bark. She looked like she wanted to die by the end… I’d like to say that revenge was sweet, but I just felt cruel. Oh well… two more hours tomorrow.

As a break from War and Peace, I’ve been working through a couple of shorter books recently and yesterday I finished “Heart of Darkness”. I am a huge fan of ‘Apocalypse Now’, that epic voyage up the Mekong starring president Jed Bartlet, and I had high hopes for the classic it was based on. Sadly, Conrad did not deliver. The man took every excuse to show of his command of the English language by using every long word he could think of. Culprits included “diaphanous”, “pestiferous”, “recondite” and “rapacious”. These were just the ones I could remember – there were far more recondite words ensconced within the recesses of every page. The horror. One could argue that this was just par for the course in the late 19th century, but one would be wrong. I’ve read plenty of books by 19th-century authors, and there are many wonderful authors who don’t have to fall back on such blatant verbiage. The book had some wonderful ideas, and I loved the figure that had been built up around Mr. Kurtz, but Mr. Kurtz himself was a complete disappointment. There are pages and pages about how Mr. Kurtz is an amazingly eloquent, lofty, moral, fallen man, but in reality, Mr. Kurtz simply mumbles “The Horror, The Horror” and bumbles off. Anyway, surprisingly, Apocalypse Now is actually far better than Heart of Darkness - a proud exception to the ‘book > film' rule if ever there was one.’’

Yesterday I started the classic thriller ’39 Steps’ and I’m pleased to say that it has to be among the best things I’ve ever read. Buchan set out to create a rip-roaring, no-holds-barred, ridiculous penny shocker and he succeeded in almost every respect. Within the first five pages the main character, a near-omnipotent but altogether-quite-humble South African with a penchant for almost every task the universe throws at him, finds himself talking about a conspiracy to start World War One with a master of disguise who has just faked his own death and is, two pages later, brutally murdered by a secret underground organisation called 'The Black Stone'. It just gets more bizarre from there on, and the protagonist dodges police, crashes cars, avoids planes, and blows up houses, while dressed up in Scottish drag. There whole thing is balls-out self-consciously ridiculous and utterly wonderful, and if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get a few more pages read before dinner! Someone has just been murdered and it's not going to end well for Blighty!