Stories from the Heart of Darkness

Timothy Findley wrote the Covid-19 pandemic story in 1998.

Back in the bad Covid Pandemic Days of 2021, I thought that Michael Lewis would eventually write the book on it, having already published a kind of prequel with The Premonition: a pandemic story. But Lewis is too busy writing the perhaps sexier tale of that erstwhile Crypto Wunderkind, Sam Bankman-Fried. And the book I had in mind had already been written. I’m referring to Headhunter, one of Timothy Findley’s masterpieces.

Findley (1930-2002) a mesmerizing actor and prolific author, remains one of Canada’s greats. His novel The Wars not only won the Governor General’s Award but was made into a successful film. From a prominent Ontario family, he was gay at a time when that didn’t help your career chances (he insisted on being called homosexual) and furiously resisted being categorized as a ‘gay’ author. His themes are resonant today: lies, sexual perversion, madness, the telling of (false) tales. His books are still in print and his eminent biographer, Sherrill Grace, deftly summarized his work thus:

What he had to say about his century was important during his lifetime, but it remains relevant—urgently so—today. His advice to himself and to all who read him was this: no matter how violent and dangerous the world becomes, do not give in to despair but pay close attention to the possibilities and joys of life.

To resist despair, he employed creative imagination in his life, and he invited his readers to do the same because he believed that “imagination can save us.”            

https://lithub.com/remembering-timothy-findley-on-his-home-ground/

Writing a brilliant literary novel about a pandemic that hasn’t happened yet certainly counts as an extraordinary leap of imagination. Such a leap would, in the normal scheme of things, not be possible. But the scheme of things has gotten disjointed. Headhunter is the eerie tale of a pandemic wrapped in virulent obsessions including sexual perversion and madness in all its forms. Headhunter might have been written during the last three years as it throws up a dark mirror to our fraying culture.

The entire 625-page novel is built on a literary conceit, a dangerous gambit in an age of rampant literalism. The conceit is this: the ‘Headhunter’ is Kurtz, the central character from another novel, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, famous for this line: the horror, the horror. Conrad (1857-1924) was a Polish British author, who wrote in his second language, English. The novel was first published as a magazine serial in three sections and is considered one of the most important novels in the English language and the inspiration for the movie, Apocalypse Now.

Conrad’s Kurtz is an ivory trader who has gone rogue in the Congo, enslaving and brutalizing the natives while going mad himself. Findley’s Kurtz is director and psychiatrist-in-chief at the Parkin Institute of Psychiatric Research, dreaming of doing ‘great things’ while simultaneously undermining his troubled clients.

What they have in common is the loss of a moral compass in their ruthless pursuit of power, control and manipulation. Anyone who thinks seriously about the state of things in the west sooner or later comes face to face with modern versions of Kurtz. As in the novel, Kurtz is everywhere. The WHO, the WEF, the military-industrial complex, Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci. The transhumanists. The gain of function labs. The public health ‘authorities’. Take your pick. But we also have Kurtz’s alter ego; Marlow. These are the people fighting for some kind of truth to emerge, struggling against the odds to bring it to light. To understand what Kurtz has been doing while not giving in to despair. Doctors. Scientists. Even some brave public figures, like Jordan Peterson. It’s the eternal struggle between the powers of darkness and light, as madness and mayhem stalk us on a daily basis.

Kurtz ‘escapes’ from page 92 of Conrad’s novel because Lilah Kemp, the mad librarian at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, has summoned him forth by mistake, as it were. By reading the book. Terrified, knowing full well who he is, she can’t get him to go back in. She fears the consequences, with the clairvoyance of a schizophrenic. When he appears as Dr Kurtz, we know with Lilah that the heart of darkness is unleashed. This includes sexual perversions leading to the murder of teenage victims, of which Kurtz is aware and about which he does nothing. He is playing a game of ultimate power, one that involves getting into the heads of his wealthy, disturbed clients and persuading them that giving huge bequests to the Parkin is good for them, and beneficial for humankind. Kurtz also knows that the explanations for the ‘plague’ or pandemic is a web of government sanctioned lies. But he chooses to call the man who dares to identify this conspiracy a classic case of paranoia. And has Smith Jones committed to a place for the criminally insane.

Marlow, Kurtz’s alter ego, the only truly sane person in the entire book, finds and reads the Smith Jones file while Kurtz himself is beginning to die of the disease. The file includes a self portrait that Kurtz asks all his patients to write.

Here is what Marlow reads:

The first thing you must understand is that I am perfectly sane. Others will want you to think I am not, but their denial of my sanity is a part of the conspiracy I have uncovered.

All you need to know of my personal history is that I have worked as an immunologist for over twenty years. For the past decade I have been Chief Research Officer at the …. branch of one of  this continent’s largest research institutions.

He doesn’t name the institution because of its impeccable scientific record and the fact that when people hear his accusations, they invariably call him a liar. They prefer to believe the institution. That does remind me of some things that have happened during our pandemic.

I grant you what I have uncovered is not so easy to believe. It calls into doubt the integrity not only of Canadian governments, past and present, but of science itself. Although I have had misgivings about the former, I have spent my entire professional life serving the latter. It is a terrible thing to discover that your most fervent beliefs have been betrayed. (my bolding)

Simply put, what I have stumbled on is a ministerial stratagem to dupe the public over a vitally important issue—namely the origin and nature of the disease which has laughably been called sturnumesia…laughable because the name, based on the starling genus, Sturnus, represents a complete fiction. The disease in question has nothing whatsoever to do with starlings….

Birds, in this context, are nothing more than scapegoats…

I still have the greatest difficulty believing my scientific colleagues would be capable of such duplicity. Some of these men and women have been my research partners and my closest friends. I simply cannot comprehend their motives. I have not been able to bring the subject up with anyone directly involved…. given the reaction of my family and the few carefully chosen colleagues to whom I first revealed this ghastly situation, it is plain that I cannot expect rationality from anyone who has actually been party to deception on the scale of this intrigue. Even if they believe they are doing the right thing—even if they have somehow been convinced it is in the public good to conceal the truth about the plague…

What has happened is this: as a result of and unpublicized experiment with genetic engineering, a new virus strain escaped from an allegedly ‘safe’ trial station and entered the world at large.

Findley doesn’t call them biolabs or level four labs because they weren’t proliferating in those days, but a quarter century ago, he had become aware of the dangers that genetic engineering represents. Gain of function is what we call it today, and apparently, a more deadly virus is already being prepared in one of these labs. Listen to Bill Gates; he has skin in that game. Not intentionally, no, but for some ‘benign’ purpose. The current controversy over the so called ‘lab leak’ is being framed that way because discussing the out-of-control lethal experimentation that is going on all over the globe in some 60 gain of function labs, many funded by the military, would make everyone freak out. We can’t have that, can we.

The final paragraphs are about vaccines, and again, Findley evokes our own ongoing fears and confusion re Covid vaccines and consequences. And the eternal question: are we, is Smith Jones, just paranoid? Kurtz thinks so. Marlow does not. The most fascinating part of what Smith Jones has to say is shockingly contemporary:

What has been active is one of modern history’s greatest hoaxes—a propaganda programme aimed at concealing the truth about the genetic engineering industry’s—and the government’s—role in bringing about the conditions in which this disease could arise.

Distractions. Camouflage. To allow the great corporations and their protective partners, the duly elected government of our nation, our provinces, our cities…to continue their profit making and their exploitation…unhindered and unhampered by conscience, by adverse publicity, by and informed electorate, by…it’s terrible. Dreadful. I cannot understand it. I can’t…

Marlow can’t either. He doesn’t know what to do with this information. Neither do we, with the revelations about our own horrible pandemic, and the things that were done ‘for our own good’. Like Marlow, we have nothing but our individual conscience to fall back on—there are no venerable institutions, no experts and no ‘authorities’ to help us in sorting this out. They are the problem, not the solution.

But who else would believe it? No one. And where could one go for confirmation? Nowhere. Was there anyone a person could trust with such information? No—there was not.

What then was paranoia?

The final paragraph:

Lilah sat on her bed with Heart of Darkness beside her.

Who would believe it?

No one.

Not even Marlowe himself, out in his kitchen.

It’s only a book, they would say. That’s all it is. A story. Just a story.

Exactly. As a true literary masterpiece, Headhunter makes us ponder the complicated role of stories, how they are framed, distorted, denied, and revised. It struck me that this process is exactly what we’re currently grappling with in trying to understand what actually transpired during the last three agonizing years. This process is far from finished and already, the other process, that of burying the truth under mountains of bureaucracy, is in full swing. Those ‘official inquiries’ will take years and by the time they deliver their verdict, life will have moved on. But there are the WhatsApp files on Hancock and friends; they do deliver a crystal clear image of what happened and why. I don’t think Hancock or any politician is an exact real life version of Kurtz, but all of these politicians display a shocking loss of moral standards. Corruption everywhere. There is more to come. Once we get into the heads of Big Pharma CEOs, Kurtz will finally be revealed in real life, in real time.

Sometimes, Life and Literature are so closely intertwined that it’s hard to untangle them.

Reading Headhunter is a timely reminder that everything that needs to be said about our current malaise has, in fact, already been said. I started re-reading my battered and bruised paperback version of Headhunter because I wanted to escape from the dreary winter of our collective discontent and despair. And landed right back in it. Yet, Findley leaves us with glimpses of hope. And he was correct: imagination, especially the literary one, can indeed save us, especially from going mad.

Like nothing else, a novel such as this illuminates the entire panorama, the terrible dilemmas, the crimes as well as the acts of mercy. Though we might prefer not to gaze into the heart of darkness, only in doing so can we liberate ourselves from its ghastly power.