Sir, – Ed O'Loughlin tells us that "the years have not been kind to Joseph Conrad", in his appreciative review of Maya Jasanoff's historical study of the Polish/English novelist, The Dawn Watch (Book reviews, 16/12/17December 16th).
Brief attention to modern criticism would reveal to Mr O’Loughlin that the times have actually been very kind to Conrad, though (rightly) not uncritical. Major radical critics such as Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Seamus Deane have long recognised Conrad’s extraordinary, if pessimistic and gloomy, political prescience.
Many writers have taken up where he left off: not only his modernist contemporaries and slightly later figures such as Graham Greene, as Mr O’Loughlin notes, but in fact major novelists of our times are hard to imagine without Conrad – Robert Stone and Don DeLillo, say.
And – tellingly – Mr O’Loughlin fails entirely to note that great writers from the decolonising world have not only condemned Conrad, as Chinua Achebe did, but also and more strikingly have re-written him: Achebe himself and also Ngugi wa Thiong’o, VS Naipaul and Tayib Saleh all redeployed the great themes of the journey into darkness which Conrad made his own.
Conrad indeed still has a great deal to tell our world today: Maya Jasanoff is hardly the first scholar or writer to see this. – Yours, etc,
CONOR McCARTHY,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.