Hearts of Darkness

Two works of non-fiction I've read this week were both in a sense journeys into the heart of darkness.

I picked up a copy of William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness at the Big Bookshop sale. It's a very slim volume, just 84 pages long, which started life as a lecture given at a symposium sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was later developed into a piece for Vanity Fair before being published as a book.

Styron was hit by serious depression at the age of 60, and describes most evocatively his own struggle with the life-threatening illness from first symptoms, through his treatment, his brush with suicide, hospitalisation to eventual cure. Along the way he includes the stories of friends and others so afflicted - many of them also writers.

It's the honesty of the book that makes it so compelling. It was one of the first "insider" accounts of depression, and captures extremely well just what it feels like. (You have to have been there to know.) I agree with him that the word "depression" is totally inadequate, sounding more like a mild case of the blues rather than something that fills your soul with dread and despair.

The second book involved a physical journey into the part of the world that Conrad described in his novel Heart of Darkness - the Congo. Tim Butcher, a journalist for The Daily Telegraph decides to recreate H.M. Stanley's famous expedition in the 1870's. (Stanley had been also sponsored by the same newspaper!) He was also curious to see the country that his mother had visited in the 1950's as a tourist. He was told that by just about everyone he contacted that the journey was impossible, but against the odds he manages to enlist the help of aid workers (including a pygmy human rights activist and the Malaysian commander of a vessel working for the UN) and others. Each stage of the journey is uncertain, and he's constantly in danger of his life and in great discomfort. But he does manage in the end to find the transport he needs (motorcycles, dugouts, a UN barge) and the journey continues. It's impossible not to salute his courage.

Blood River : A Journey into Africa's Broken Heart is a fascinating account, not just because it takes us into a part of the world we wouldn't normally venture into and lets us share the journey (from our comfy armchairs!), but also for the historical perspectives which are woven into the narrative.

In the space of half a century, Congo has gone completely backwards - it is not "a developing country", or an "underdeveloped country", so much as an "un-developing country", going backwards so fast that almost nothing remains of the infrastructure left under Belgian rule due to the greed and incompetence of its leaders. It's a terrifying portrait of how quickly things can unravel. You also come to realise that putting things right isn't a matter of throwing financial aid at the problems, but in establishing the rule of law.

It's impossible not to really pity the ordinary people of this failed country, but that there is such potential for economic growth (minerals, fertile land) turns this missed opportunity into a tragedy.

As you would expect, there's plenty of coverage of the book on The Telegraph website, including photos and extracts.

The book was chosen as one of the reads for the Richard and Judy bookclub and of course made the shortlist for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize.

Many thanks to Kavita of Pansing for passing me this copy.

The Power of Dreams

I'm a great believer in the power of dreams. Have had many which have told me truths about myself that I hadn't got round to facing. Have had others which have told me the truth about relationships I was in. (I wish I had listened more carefully.) Have recognised a soul-mate from a dream and wasn't wrong. Was told in another that someone needed my help even before my waking self had recognised it.

I write my dreams down as soon as I wake, because I know they are important.

I keep dipping into Naomi Epel's book Writer's Dreaming, and in fact have used extracts from it on my course where I do a writing-from-dream-exercise.



Epal interviewed 26 writers about their dreams and their creative process what is facinating is how many of the writers featured have used dreams to help them in their work. Many more writers talk about entering a "dream-like state" when they write.

William Styron saw the heroine of his novel in a "waking vision" standing in a hallway of a boarding house in Flatbush, a number tattoed on her arm.



And Bharati Mukherjee (a writer I was lucky enough to meet not long ago) has dreamed the endings to stories and to her novel Jasmine. She says:

As I'm getting to the end of a story, the ending that, during my waking hours, I think will happen is sometimes subverted or obliterated by the dream. It happens as I'm just about to write that scene. ... In many of the stories in The Middleman, the endings are not the way I had planned them.

(The Middleman is one of the best collections of short-fiction I've ever read. Just don't know how Mukherjee can get so far into the heads of all these so different characters ...)



Just for fun, dear readers, here's a little quiz for you. A famous writer had the following dream. At the time that Epel's book went to print, this writer had not yet used the material in his writing. Later it became the basis of a novel.

Now then, can you name the writer and the novel. (Anyone who has done my course is not allowed to answer!) First prize as usual is to buy me lunch.

I don't have repetitive dreams but I do have an anxiety dream: I'm working very hard in this hot little room where I lived as a teenager - and I'm aware that there's a madwoman in th attic. There's a little tiny door under the eave that goes to the attic and I have to finish my work. I have to get that work done or she'll come and get me. At some point in this dream that door always bursts open and this hideous woman - with all this white hair stuck up around her head like a gone-to-seed dandelion - jumps out with a scapel.

And I wake up.

I still have that dream when I'm backed up on my work and trying to fill all these ridiculous commitments I've made for myself.