Into the darkness

The fact that English happened to be his third language, after French and his native Polish, did not prevent him from forging a reputation as a masterful stylist. Indeed, TE Lawrence described him as “the most haunting thing in prose that ever was” and put it that each paragraph Conrad wrote “goes on sounding like waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops”.

Particularly gifted in portraying place and in establishing and developing atmosphere, his works, including Nostromo, The Nigger of Narcissus, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness (which inspired Coppola’s cinematic tour de force, Apocalypse Now), rank among the finest that the century would produce.

David Miller, in this debut novel, approaches the big subject of Conrad with sensible and admirable caution, letting his focus fall not on the literary giant’s halcyon days of high adventure with both the French and British merchant navy, a time of gunrunning, rumours of duelling and love affairs that might seem so ripe for a fictional retelling, but on the great man’s final brittle moments.

Told from varying points of view, over the span of a week in August, 1924, Today deals with Conrad’s slow crumbling into death, and the coming together of family and friends to deal with the consequences and implications of his passing. The book only happens to be about Conrad, a meditation on death, specifically the dying of a patriarch, and it is also about the things death brings, about the way in which it impacts on family and on the immediate surround.

Today is not without its flaws, the rather insipid title choice not least among them. At the beginning we are presented, in order of appearance, with a play list of characters, or Dramatis Personae; three and a half pages of them, stacked by name, age and status. The vast majority of these are underdeveloped, somewhat of a necessity given the brief and quite daring 160-page running length.

The core cast do fare somewhat better, with John, the youngest son, and Lilian, Conrad’s ‘typewriter’, both of who take turns driving the narrative, being particularly well-crafted. But of the rest, Conrad’s wife, the invalid Jessie, and in particular the eldest son, Borys, a war veteran and suggested wastrel, closed off, crude, salacious, who intrigues even in brief dispatches, feel like missed opportunities.

Happily, the best moments easily counterbalance any problems. Miller manages, often with mere implication, to imbue a notable tension between the parties. There are beats of insight, sweet intimacies, such as the widowed Jessie considering the details of the last lucid night she spent with Conrad, how they had rowed over something inconsequential and how he had gone to bed without kissing her, for the first and only time in their entire married life.

For the most part, though, little is said in an outright manner, so we are drawn into the text, and even put to work imagining the subtexts. Writing in this way is a risk but, in this case, it is one worth taking. And when the author gets it right, which is often, the effect is very impressive. Perhaps even close to triumphant.