From first-time Ottawa author David Wightman comes his self-published novel Apocalypse Chow: A Remix of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As the title promises, the book is a faithful paragraph-by-paragraph parody of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. It’s also inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, another adaptation of the novella.
Apocalypse Chow tries to be all at once a food-based parody of Heart of Darkness, a critique of restaurant culture, a love letter to under-used Ontario wild foods, and a warning of looming ecological apocalypse. It’s a bold set of goals, even if the novel doesn’t manage to fully achieve them.
In Wightman’s version of Conrad’s well-adapted work, restaurant manager Charlie Marlow is deployed on a trip to fire world-famous chef Walter E. Kurtz, who has stopped following the commands of his superiors. Marlow learns more about the enigmatic chef as he ventures further into the heart of darkness (this time northern Canada instead of deep in the Congo).
The biggest issue with Apocalypse Chow is its source material. As a parody that sticks so close to the original’s form, there isn’t much room for Wightman to fix the structural problems of Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s original novella is plagued with pacing issues that make the story an unbearable slog. The characters are all lifeless, except Kurtz, who we are told about all through the book but don’t meet until the end of it. This leaves most of the story as nothing but lead-up to the inevitable meeting between Marlow and the book’s one interesting character.
Apocalypse Chow has these same pacing and character issues. We suffer through dull characters talking about how interesting the famous chef Kurtz is. Then, we meet him and the book is over. Conrad’s plot also doesn’t really translate to the modern day. The main thrust of Marlow being sent on a dangerous mission into the wilds to fire Kurtz doesn’t really work when his bosses could just send the man an email and stop paying him.
The entire narrative is recounted by Marlow, so almost every paragraph starts with quotations. Why tell a story about someone telling a story? Why aren’t we just reading the story that the character is telling? The meta-narrative adds nothing to the main story—it’s just a weird stylistic choice that makes the book more convoluted and harder to read. Apocalypse Chow might have felt like it had to replicate these flaws, but as a parody, it would have been better making fun of them.
The book works best when it openly lampoons its inspirations. “I love the smell of bacon in the morning,” one character says, in reference to Apocalypse Now’s famous “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Wightman expertly transforms, line by line, a full monologue about a man obsessed with war into a man obsessed with bacon—and it works.
Conrad’s original work used dense and flowery language for what felt like no reason other than to show off his vocabulary. Wightman also uses dense and flowery language, but his prose is a lot more readable than Conrad’s and suits the food motif well—the eloquent language compliments its over-the-top description of food.
The language also juxtaposes the subject matter to comedic effect. The plot of Apocalypse Chow is nowhere near as serious as Heart of Darkness, so hearing characters say things like “we will face this great hunger together, satiated, enriched, and full of the flame that is present in each one of us; the light of Life,” comes across as more funny than obtuse. No, nobody would ever talk like that, but in Apocalypse Chow I don’t get the feeling that I’m trying to be convinced that somebody would.
Apocalypse Chow is an impressively faithful parody, but it’s faithful to a fault. The book falls into too many of the same pitfalls as its source material. But, when it stops trying to replicate Conrad’s mediocre work and starts lampooning its inspirations, Apocalypse Chow becomes a worthy parody.
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