Tonight:
5°c
Things must be desperate if Gordon Brown is invoking the name of Joseph Conrad.
The Prime Minister quoted from Conrad's novel Typhoon to describe his response to the current economic turmoil. “The best way to deal with that storm is, he said, facing it, facing it,” said Brown. “I think all the Cabinet and all the Government are of the same mind.”
Brown has always claimed to be suspiciously ecumenical when it comes to his literary tastes (he professes to love everybody from HG Wells to Albert Camus). Until now he has never mentioned Conrad. But the depressive Pole and the dour Scot have more common than you might think.
Conrad was the most miserablist man of modern letters, subject to fits of depression, self-doubt and pessimism. He was also conditioned by living in exile — just as Brown spent 10 years in exile from what he saw as his rightful job. On the other hand, what better writer to consult if, like our premier, you are all at sea?
Conrad (born Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski) served 16 years in the merchant navy before turning his hand to writing what are arguably some of the greatest novels in the English language (Heart of Darkness, Nostromo). His experience of loneliness at sea, of human corruption, and of the pitilessness of nature helped to form his uniquely bleak vision of the world — a world depicted to brilliant and atmospheric effect in his fiction. His characters all live on the edge of a great anxiety and a threatened loss.
Conrad realised that “the sea has no generosity” and that its fearful power was beyond man's control. Our Prime Minister must know the feeling. The markets have no generosity when it comes to political reputations.
There are other lessons to be learned from Conrad too. His novel The Secret Agent was remarkably prescient about the terrorist threat. “A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive,” says the sinister foreign diplomat Vladimir. Vladimir, who recruits the agent Verloc to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, derides England for providing sanctuary to agitators and terrorists that other nations seek to eliminate. “This is an absurd country," he concludes.
In Conrad's books destiny can be pretty nasty to its protagonists. As the literary critic VS Pritchett noted, his books are like dreams, dreams that slow down to the intense heat of nightmare. In a sense there could be no more fitting writer for our febrile times. At least Gordon Brown got that right.
