'I think the problem with Conrad's book is actually much simpler and more profound.'
Can I slow you down just a bit, there. There's a problem with Conrad's book? This is a novel that is acknowledged to be one of the greatest works of fiction; so if you have found a problem with it, you ought to make a great impact on literary criticism.
Anyway, let's hear what 'the problem with Conrad's book' is ...
Michael writes 'He wanted to get at truth,' whoa, hold your horses. He 'wanted to get at the truth'? What truth, exactly? I think Conrad wanted to write a good novel. 'The truth' - if 'truth' is the name you give to what art does - that he is looking for is not some journalistic account of what was happening in the Congo.
Michael continues: 'and instead he produced mystification, when the truth was right in front of his face.' and the truth is not mysterious? Mystery is not part of the truth?
The final nail in the coffin of this post is this: 'Adam Hochschild's book _King Leopold's Ghost_ is 100 times more interesting than Heart of Darkness'.
Heart of Darkness v King Leopold's Ghost? Why not Salvador Dali's 'Premonition of Civil War' v the program of the P.O.U.M, or, or Finnegan's Wake v 'Ireland on the Dissecting Table', or 'the accidental meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table', for that matter. Conrad and Hochschild are not only not in the same league (be serious, Hochschild is not worth the steam off Conrad's piss - even I, not even that big a fan of Conrad's, know that much, and Hochschild, for sure, knows it), but in any event Conrad and Hochschild are not even trying to do the same thing.
Adam Hochschild's book is ok, though by no means very good, more importantly it is wholly derivative, and more than a hundred years after the event. But it is a history, not a work of fiction.
To understand Conrad's position in relation to 'the truth' of the Congo, you need to understand that the journalistic job of exposing the atrocities in the Belgian Congo *had already happened*. It was Henry Fox Bourne of the Aborigines' Protection Society who exposed most of the core atrocities of the Belgian Congo, in 1895, four years before Conrad's book was serialised in Blackwoods magazine.
Fox Bourne was an idefatigable campaigner (and yes, patrician liberal anti-racist), and had a firestorm of press interest in the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, which he exposed in Houses of Commons and in public meetings up and down the land - long before ED Morel got on board the anti-Leopold bandwagon.
Conrad did not write his book to expose the atrocities in the Belgian Congo. He used the Belgian Congo as a backdrop to his novel because he knew that the average English reader would be familiar enough with the stories of the atrocities for Conrad to allude to them without spelling them out, which was what he needed to do to do the real work of the book, which is to investigate the state of mind of the protagonists, their capacity to think about the inhumanity of which they are a part.
Hocshchild, who is a good journalist, but basically a wishy-washy liberal (don't get me started on his outrageous whitewash of Britain's 'anti-slavery' imperialism), simply put together a good cut and paste history out of the real investigations of others (whom to his credit he does credit). Among modern scholars, Neal Ascherson's The King Incorporated is the best work.