Download A Kind of Light AudioBook Free
Written in 1987 and just lately learned by his widow, H. R. F. Keating's A Sort of Light is an homage to Joseph Conrad, a writer he greatly admired. It is from that author's Heart of Darkness that the name is taken. Conrad's African jungle is the setting up, and they have two interwoven reports. The first concerns a young Victorian gentlewoman who packages out in to the heart of the Deep Continent, accompanied only by native bearers, searching for a seed which she has been advised is the stop for the ravaging disease typhoid. She will keep diaries, six which resurface a century later. Excerpts of these, as well as a firsthand narration of her bodily hazardous and mentally disturbing quest, give us a view of Africa a century back. Alongside this, but set in present-day 1987, when Keating had written the book, a young couple, having learnt of the lifetime of the diaries and the possibility that a further six were written and were preserved in Africa, determine to make a documentary film following in her footsteps, plus they, too, set off into the anonymous, hoping to find the rest of the notebooks. Keating, as regular, manages to underscore these gripping narratives with provocative philosophical arguments on such topics as savagery versus civilisation, innocence versus problem and atheism versus divinity as well as discovering the moral dilemmas facing the young in the mid-1980s. Five years after his death, there is absolutely no hesitation that Keating could have been delighted that A Sort of Light is surfacing as a genuine audiobook - he was passionate about the spoken word. http://www.hrfkeating.com.
