Dark flowering

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the sailor Charles Marlow recalls captaining a river steamer in the Belgian Congo, a venture that becomes a search for the colonial agent Kurtz, said to be a brilliant if infamous ivory trader, who is ill and possibly mad. Marlow’s journey, of course, becomes a passage into psychological as well as (to the European mind) geographical darkness, and offers a damning portrait of Western imperialism.

The title story of The Gorgon Flower, John Richards’s inspired début short story collection, follows a similar trajectory to Conrad’s canonical, but problematic, novella. Conveyed almost entirely through journal entries, it emulates the diaries of colonial explorers, and tells of (the fictional) Lord Tobias Edmundson’s 1861 journey up river and his trudge through dense jungle in Borneo in search of the eponymous flower. Thirty years earlier, Tobias’s botanist father was the first European to find the Gorgon flower, an elusive plant notable for its great size and striking appearance but also for its carnivorous appetite and hypnotic hold over nearby creatures – a grip that, to us as readers, seems to include its human attendees (think of the gorgons of Greek myth). Edmundson Sr had brought a specimen back to England, feeding it creatures living and dead. But both father and flower were lost when a fire swept through the father’s conservatory. The rediscovery and mapping of the plant by an English explorer in 1860 sets Tobias, also a botanist, on his journey.