When I was a moody teenager living in a Lancashire mill town, the nearest bookshop was three bus rides away among the bright lights of Manchester. I’d ready pretty much everything of interest in the local library and school library (and thank heavens for those).
Luckily, the newsagent tucked away – on the bottom shelf in the far corner – some cheap paperback editions of classics. It seemed a more or less random selection but it did mean I devoured almost every novel ever written by Joseph Conrad. So I pounced on the paperback of Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World when I spotted it recently. It’s brilliant. Her basic argument is that Conrad is a novelist of globalisation – his novels: “meditate on how to behave in a globalizing world, where old rulebooks are becoming obsolete not nobody’s yet written new ones.” The term globalization dates from the 1980s but there was a late 19th and early 20th century version.
The Dawn Watch is so well written itself. One example: “History is like therapy for the present: it makes it talk about its parents.” The biographical tale zips along, interspersed with Jasanoff’s own travel adventures in Conrad’s footsteps – her trip to DRC and up the Congo, rereading Heart of Darkness bookends the biography. Jasanoff reflects on Chinua Achebe’s critique of Conrad’s novel as imperialist fiction, agreeing that it is a non-valid window on modern Africa. But she ends by concluding that while indeed the 21st century is not the 19th, the challenges of globalization are fundamentally the same as those Conrad identified: “The heirs of Conrad’s technologically displaced sailors are to be found in the industries disrupted by digitization. The analogues to his anarchists are to be found in Internet chat rooms or terrorist cells.”
I like this observation by Conrad himself, about fiction versus history: “Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents … on second hand impressions.”
As it happened, I’d recently read Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, a quotation of course from Heart of Darkness. That’s an impassioned reflection on the legacy of European imperialism.
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The other book I polished off this week was Peter Frankopan’s The New Silk Roads, the sequel to his best seller. Rather than a history, it’s a very readable account of the current context of the Belt and Road Initiative. Given that every day seems to bring some news about China’s initiative and projection of economic power, this is a timely book. I enjoyed its predecessor, The Silk Roads, more as I knew so little about the history of the region. But even if The New Silk Roads covers more familiar material, its Asian and China centric lens makes it well worth a read.