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Like contemporaries Haggard and Melville, Joseph Conrad lived the adventures he wrote. He left his native Ukraine to escape the political persecution of his family and became a merchant marine in France, sailing to the West Indies and gun-running for a failed Spanish coup. Soon after, he learned English and became a british citizen, eventually attaining the position of Master Mariner. Had his story ended there, he might have become merely a footnote in history: a successful seaman and minor writer of romantic adventures.

Instead, he took a fateful steamship voyage into deepest Africa, an experience which forever changed him. Like the protagonist of the book which his journey inspired, Conrad found horror deep in the jungles. He witnessed the cruel depth of mankind, and not in the barbaric tribes, but in the colonial whites who ruled them. Far from civilization or law, these men became utter tyrants, mad with power and answerable to no one.

Having lived under repressive colonial forces in his own troubled Ukraine, Conrad's deconstruction of this human subjugation was both sympathetic and satirical. Apparently unable to detect Conrad's sarcasm, Chinua Achebe accused him of the most profound racism. Doubtless, he was tired of his continent being defined in literature by an outsider. Why Achebe then chose to write his own, much more hopeless, racist, and sarcastic book in an attempt to replace Conrad's, it is difficult to say.

When Conrad finally emerged from Africa, he was a different man. He said of the experience that it forced him to cease simply living, like an animal might; instead he found himself saddled with a profound self-awareness. As any writer can tell you, only two things issue from inescapable self-awareness: pain and art.

Conrad's writings took a darker turn, resulting in his most contentious and influential work, 'The Heart of Darkness'. While his other stories are not without death and pain, they tend towards lighter fare, none quite reaching its inexorable brooding. Doubtless this is why it garners the most attention, dealing as it does with messy issues like race, nation, and death. The author's literary catharsis leaves us raw and shocked, but then it was always Cornad's intention to use writing as a means to share real experiences with his reader.

Though often compared to other adventure fiction of the era, such as Stevenson's or Haggard's, like Melville, Conrad transcends his genre. His tight pacing and evocative, poetic prose help to elevate all of his stories, and here, his language is bolstered by an overriding, passionate, personal message. There is an ever-present thread of philosophy throughout all of Conrad's works, but rarely is it as naked and powerful.

In some ways, the great interest paid to 'Heart of Darkness' is unfortunate, as it tends to ignore the rest of his varied and masterfully-constructed oeuvre, but the vast swathes praise and criticism are not misplaced: it is a Great Book.