Reading 'Lord Jim' in Rwanda

In the final flurry of packing for six weeks away, I discarded two novels. By the end of the first week, without company in Burundi, I had finished 'An equal music', which turned out to be a much quicker read than Vikram Seth's other novel, 'A suitable boy'.

'Middlemarch', written for a Victorian audience who also had plenty of time to read, was an excellent choice in October. In the first days, conditioned by a much busier life at home, I read for the story line, eager to get to incidents remembered from previous readings. Then I deliberately slowed down, relishing the visual detail, the moral complexities, the delicious ironies, which sustained me for nearly the whole month. But I hadn't found a successor for this trip.

Reading and blogging are pretty much my only occupations in the evenings. The situation was serious.

There must be libraries containing good English novels in Kigali – indeed I know VSO has a collection of books to lend to volunteers and I could probably throw myself on their mercy. Later I found several books I wanted to read on Ruth and Krystan's two shelves. After a few days in Kigali, however, in Nakumat – one of two westernised town centre supermarkets – buying a grater for the Bucura household I remembered the stand of shrink-wrapped Penguin Classics, where I had bought a copy of 'North and South' to pass the eight hour wait in Nairobi on my way home last time.

The selection was pretty similar - I don't know how often they restock. Nothing was an obvious choice. Then I started weighing the merits of 'Lord Jim'. Conrad's prose needs focussed attention. Indeed one long paragraph can be enough to induce sleep. Despite the volume's slimness, compared with 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles', for example, I decided it would meet my needs. It would not overload my backpack. As far as possible I had avoided Conrad at university, apart from 'Heart of Darkness' which was a set book. I knew my maternal grandfather had been a keen reader, buying first editions, which my parents had given away when clearing my grandmother's house. How my teenage self rued the fact that at ten I had been too young to intervene!

I'm still only a third of the way through, as other books I wanted to read can't be taken with me. The first 30 pages were hard going and I made a couple of false starts. Now at almost page 100 Jim's inexplicable act at a moment of crisis, which leads to his trial, ostracism and disgrace, has just occurred - in the narrative of Marlow, whom Jim chose to listen to his account of the circumstnces which almost justify his moment of shame but which will never come out in the trial. The merchant ship on which Jim is a junior officer, carrying 800 Asian pilgrims acrosss the Indian Ocean, is evidently about to sink, in the night, as a squall approaches, with no time to rescue the pilgrims and not enough boats to accommodate them. In a moment which Jim can't recollect, though he recounts the rest of the night's events in considerable detail, he has saved his skin by jumping into the boat launched by his three despicable senior oficers, like them abandoning ship. Twice in the description of first few hours in which the shame of his situation grows on him he uses the same phrase: 'all in the same boat'. It's literally true. And it prevents him from separating himself from the 'three dirty owls'.

Some of the most poignant stories from the war in Rwanda are those of Hutu who were pressured into killing – often to save their families, not themselves. Still, they did what they did, and horrendous circumstances don't excuse their actions or reduce their prison sentences.

Since 2003 many killers have been released from prison and have returned to their communities where they live side by side with survivors whose relatives they killed. Unable to escape each other: all in the same boat.

And in Rwanda as a whole – a small country, densely populated, with political tension rising ahead of elections later in the year – even those who don't like each other much have to sink or swim together: landlocked and, as it were, all in the same boat.