Marc Martin has been kind enough to put my mind at ease. Those of you who read my recent review of Marc Martin’s A River may remember my foot note:

The river looks like the Thames to me and interestingly, our narrator’s lines on the opening page, “There is a river outside my window. From where I sit, I can see it stretching into the distance in both directions”,  mirror Conrad’s description of the Thames in the opening of Heart of Darkness, “The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway”. I couldn’t help but think there are references to HoD scattered throughout A River and would be interested to know if that is what Mark Martin had in mind when creating this visual feast of a book.

Well, Marc actually came back to me to let me know the river in A River isn’t in fact the Thames. It is a fictional amalgam of the Thames, Seine and Hudson. Ok. So I lost that one BUT I was’t that far off with my thought about Heart of Darkness. Marc told me there is a “little” HoD in A River, “Love the mood captured, but not really into the colonialism, or the ‘othering’ of nature/environment though”. Fair enough, Marc.