Eden’s Shore
Oisín Fagan
Over Christmas, I watched Apocalyse Now for the first time – I was studying Heart of Darkness with my Year 12 class and, having instructed them to watch this interpretation of the book over the holidays, I felt I probably ought to see it too. It made me appreciate the brevity of Conrad’s novel. Stretched over more than 3 hours (I could only find the director’s cut), the brutality and insanity that the novel depicts was, I found, almost unbearable. It was, for me, just too harrowing and I couldn’t even manage it in one stint – I had to take a tea break a couple of hours in. My discomfort left me feeling slightly guilty: Apocalypse Now depicts a very real horror that some people had no choice but to endure. On some level, I felt that watching the film, and thereby bearing witness to that torture, was the least I could do. But on another level I wondered if this sentiment was a hollow one: did my discomfort serve any purpose? Was there anything to be achieved by watching such unpleasantness?
Reading Eden’s Shore reminded me of this experience and this dilemma. It, too, depicts a very real-life horror: the colonization of Brazil. It does so unflinchingly, portraying the violence and illogic of that venture in brilliant detail. One act of brutality is followed swiftly by another and, like Heart of Darkness, this novel also captures the non-sensical nature of the entire enterprise; it depicts vividly the ignorance and confusion of the colonisers. Through either alcohol or illness, many of the characters exist in a state of fever-induced delirium; real events and mixed with hallucinatory sequences, adding to the sense of chaos.
it was all very well executed. My main feeling as I was reading it was, however, that I just wanted it to stop. After one particularly gruesome incident that made me go ‘argh’ aloud, I did in fact close the book and call it a day. Clearly, this book is doing important work; it bears witness to a deeply unpleasant historical period. But I would have to say I endured rather than enjoyed it.
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