Conrad in the Spy Novel and Modern Popular Literature

Chapter 6 records sightings of Conrad in popular novels and a non-fiction history by a transnational array of authors—German, Colombian, French, and preeminently English, only because of the present author’s sightings of Conrad in several works by John Le Carré, whose oeuvre of his latter years transcended the spy novel genre: In Our Game set in a former Soviet Chechen backwater satellite Ingushetia, the intimations of Conrad presences are beyond number thematically, stylistically, and narratively—dilemmas of betrayal as fidelity; The Honourable Schoolboy parallels uncannily Conrad’s vision of the exotic East and his retrospective Author’s Notes in late editions of his novels; and The Little Drummer Girl evokes The Secret Agent. Forgotten Fatherland, a nonfictional account of a Utopian project to create a new Germany in Paraguay, summons reference to Conrad’s adventurer friend, hybrid Scots-Spanish aristocrat Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham; in Saturday Ian MacEwan invokes Darwinist themes in Conrad’s Victory and creates his atavistic Baxter; his Lessons draws explicitly on Conrad’s nostalgic reminiscence in “Youth”; W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn contains an entire chapter devoted to Heart of Darkness, Roger Casement, and Leopold II; Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton has even in its title the author’s debt to Conrad; Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana is a sustained metafiction in which its narrator-protagonist accuses Conrad of stealing his life.