Least exciting conspiracy ever
Published in 1901, The Inheritors is a collaborative novel by English authors Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. The story is narrated by Arthur, who is also referred to by his title of landed nobility, Etchingham Granger. While touring a historic cathedral, Arthur meets an attractive woman in his tour group and begins flirting with her. He initially takes her for an American, but she nonchalantly informs him that she actually hails from the fourth dimension. Her purpose for coming to our world is to maneuver the overthrow of the established societal order and thereby become one of the powerful few who get to “inherit the earth.” She invites Arthur to be her toady and convinces him to let her pose as his sister. He acquiesces because he hopes to sleep with her, but the arrangement soon becomes uncomfortable when her political machinations begin to tarnish his family’s good name.
The situation sounds like it has the potential for farcical humor, but the authors play it deadly serious. Is she really from the fourth dimension, or is she just putting on strange airs? If her claims are true, then this would qualify as a science fiction novel. The authors never really explore the idea any further, however, so the reader never really understands the truth of her origin nor is given any reason to care about it. After the unusual claims she makes in the first chapter, Conrad and Ford pretty much just drop the idea and deliver a rather boring political thriller. Arthur is a writer by trade, and he gets a job penning weekly human interest pieces about celebrities. He becomes friends with one of his subjects, Foreign Minister Churchill (not Winston, but a fictional Edward), who becomes a target of the Dimensionalists. Much of the story focuses on the writer’s life, the business of journalism, and so forth, while spooky references are made to a Machiavellian railroad baron’s sinister plot to annex Greenland.
Try as I may, I just can’t wrap my head around Joseph Conrad. On the one hand, the guy has as great a command of the English language as anyone else in literature. On the other hand, he seems bent on using his talents to take various genres of adventure literature—nautical thrillers, tropical exploration, espionage, and in this case science fiction—and render them as boring as possible. I have no prior experience with Ford Madox Ford, who at this time had not yet found his pseudonym and was still writing under his birth name of Ford M. Hueffer. Whichever of them is to blame for this novel’s relentless obsession with the myriad stratifications of the English class system, I wish he would have stopped minutely describing people’s clothing, furniture, and eyebrow movements and just told me a satisfying story.
For readers living in today’s political climate, where politicians get away with murder, the idea that one corruption scandal is going to tear down the whole order of British government and shift power into the hands of a secret cabal seems incredibly naive. And for a far-fetched thriller, as far as plans for world domination go, this one is quite tame and tepid. For all this novel’s pompous malevolence, the gains that are won in the end feel like small victories, the inconsequential ramifications of a dull plot. Anyone approaching this book from an interest in early science fiction will be disappointed, and fans of Conrad and Ford no doubt have greater, better-known works on which to spend their reading time. The Inheritors is best left avoided.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2CU7FMZ5N88HP/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Into the wilds of human depravity
Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness was originally serialized in 1899 issues of Blackwood’s Magazine before being published in a 1902 collection of Conrad’s short fiction entitled Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories. The fact that Heart of Darkness wasn’t even designated the title selection of that collection is an indication that it did not garner a lot of notice when it was first released. Since then, however, it has become one of the most highly acclaimed and deeply scrutinized works of literature in the English language. The story is based on a trip Conrad made up the Congo River. In the novella, the river is unnamed, and the word Congo is never used to describe the setting, but the narrative clearly takes place in Africa.
Charles Marlow, a passenger on a Thames River steamboat, narrates the story to a group of fellow travelers. Marlow explains that he has often had an attraction for blank spaces on the map, and one day he selects one of these little explored regions of the world and decides to venture there. Marlow takes a job as a steamboat captain for a British trading company, but in order to take command of his vessel he must first journey to a remote trading post in the interior of Africa. The company’s primary business in Africa is to buy ivory from the natives, and no one brings in as much ivory as Mr. Kurtz, a company man who has apparently gone rogue, disappeared into the deep wilderness, and established an uncommon rapport with the native population. It is even rumored that the local inhabitants worship him as a god. As Marlow proceeds on his trek upriver, he gradually learns more about this mysterious Mr. Kurtz and develops a personal obsession with the man.
This obsession is not entirely contagious. So much of Heart of Darkness is spent proclaiming how extraordinary and astonishing Kurtz is, that when the reader finally meets him it is a bit of a letdown. Perhaps this reader has become jaded by the intervening century of adventure literature and explorer biographies, but the idea of a white adventurer in a remote wilderness “going native” and turning megalomaniacal in the process doesn’t particularly shock or surprise. One wonders if that didn’t happen quite often at the height of 19th century colonialism. The picture Conrad paints of European colonialism in Africa is frightening. He depicts frankly the horrible treatment of the black race by the whites, but he never really portrays the blacks positively either. The novella seems to have been written at a time period between the celebration of empire and the condemning of it, when it was enough to just point out the disgusting aspects of colonialism in a matter-of-fact matter without actually expressing any disgust, outrage, or sympathy.
Conrad is considered one of the all-time masters of the English language, and there is no doubt that the prose in Heart of Darkness is artfully crafted. Perhaps at times it is too much so. Though the book’s best quality is its creepy and dangerous atmosphere, too often this gets lost in a veil of flowery verbiage too pretty for its harsh subject matter. The idea that Marlow is relating this story out loud is ridiculous, since the language doesn’t at all resemble human speech but rather carefully constructed written prose. Almost every sentence in the book is quotable, but cumulatively it adds up to a whole lot of adjectives and metaphors being used to describe every mundane detail of movement or expression. There’s a difference between admiring a great work of literature and actually enjoying the reading of it, and too often Heart of Darkness falls on the wrong side of that line. Though it is worthy of respect, it is not always compelling.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R1HI9U6NA8SFS/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Disjointed, overwritten, and slow
Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim was originally published as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine, running from 1899 to 1900. Jim (no last name given), the son of an English parson, grows up with romantic notions of life as a sailor. When he comes of age, he enthusiastically enters the trade and eventually ends up in Southeast Asia. Jim signs on as first mate of the Patna, a ship overloaded with Muslim passengers bound for Mecca. One night the ship strikes something and begins to take on water. Cut to a month later at a magistrate’s court: an inquiry is being held, and Jim is the accused. That fateful night at sea, Jim and the rest of the Patna crew abandoned the ship, leaving the passengers on board the damaged vessel. While his shipmates flee from the inquest, Jim faces up to his punishment, and takes his medicine like a man. He is stripped of his seaman’s status in public disgrace.
A spectator at the trial, Marlow, strikes up a friendship with Jim and strives to find him a position in which he can start his life anew. Most of the novel is narrated by Marlow, as if speaking to a roomful of listeners. Jim and Marlow have long conversations about the shame and regret brought on by Jim’s cowardice. This shame and regret is painstakingly dissected, analyzed, and dwelled upon for over half the book. Thankfully, the story eventually picks up as Jim seemingly finds his place in the world and is given a shot at redemption.
The last several chapters of Lord Jim actually amount to a pretty good book. The trouble is the 37 chapters of digressions and verbosity that you have to wade through to get there. I’m familiar enough with Conrad to know that, despite the exotic locale, you’re not going to get a typical South Seas adventure from him. Nevertheless, seeing as how this book is hailed as one of his great masterpieces, I was hoping for at least a satisfying plot. There may be one here, but unfortunately it’s buried under heaps of overdescription. It’s almost as if Conrad is describing a series of paintings rather than writing a novel. He frustratingly refuses to just tell you what happened, instead opting for confusion and obfuscation. When the story cuts to the inquiry, for example, you don’t know what happened on the Patna, and Conrad makes you wait three or four chapters before he gets around to telling you. The jumps in chronology and switching of narrators feels like ostentatious literary novelty. These techniques in no way enhance the realism or emotional power of the story. If you listen carefully, you can hear the snores of Marlow’s audience.
Based on the kind of literature I enjoy reading, I feel like I should like Conrad, but I always end up being disappointed by his books. I liked Victory a little better than this one, but not much. Those who prefer the straightforward storytelling of Melville or Stevenson won’t take kindly to Conrad’s ornate verbal carpet. One can’t help thinking that he would have made a great fireside storyteller if he didn’t approach every scene obliquely and overanalyze every emotion. He’s got the whole South Pacific as his canvas, but he’s stuck in one corner delineating a supporting character’s eyebrow in exquisite detail. This should have been an interesting, exciting, and moving novel, but instead it’s mostly just tedious. The ending is somewhat compelling, but not enough to redeem the novel as a whole. Lord Jim may have put me off Conrad for good.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R11LWVKX1MI2RF/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
A great author’s mediocre debut
Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was originally published in 1895. The title character, Kaspar Almayer, is a Dutchman who ventures into Borneo as the representative of a trading company. For many years he is the only white man residing at Sambir, a village on the eastern coast of the island. Almayer dreams of discovering a rich gold mine, but all his expeditions toward this end prove fruitless. His mentor, Captain Lingard, adopted a young native girl, the daughter of Malay pirates who were killed in a sea battle. In a business arrangement, Lingard offers the girl to young Almayer as a bride, establishing his new son-in-law as heir to all his enterprises. The Almayers’ marriage is a loveless one. Mrs. Almayer despises her husband for his failures and distrusts his white man’s ways. The one good thing to come from this union is a daughter, Nina, who turns out to be the one thing, other than his dreams of gold, that Almayer truly loves. As the half-caste girl matures into a beautiful young woman, her two parents battle over her future. The father wishes to make a European lady out of her, while the mother wants to raise her according to the Malay traditions of her ancestors.
Almayer’s Folly is a difficult story to get into. The main characters are engaging enough, but Conrad throws in a disorienting supporting cast. There’s a lot of scheming going on, and it’s difficult to keep track of who’s working for whom and what each party is after. Also adding to the difficulty is the fact that Conrad seems to value description over storytelling. His work in general, and this novel in particular, is an odd hybrid of the exotic locales and island adventures one might find in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson with the more sensitive, impressionistic realism of a Henry James. Much like Rudyard Kipling, Conrad goes to great lengths to establish the atmosphere of his exotic settings, incorporating lots of local color, foreign-language terms, and native slang. Rather than involving the reader in the story, however, all this ambience only manages to obscure the narrative and prevent the reader from caring about the characters. The details presented here of East Indies history and politics, however authentic they may be, are more confusing than interesting. Meanwhile, Conrad’s lengthy descriptions of facial expressions or clouds in the sky become tedious and only serve to distract the reader from the fundamental human drama of Almayer’s relationship with his daughter. There are some truly memorable moments in Almayer’s Folly, but one feels like he has to slog through too much unnecessary and forgettable verbiage in order to find them.
This is the first work in what is known as Conrad’s “Malay trilogy,” with An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue being the second and third books, respectively. I’m not sure how closely related those other two books are to this one, but reading Almayer’s Folly doesn’t make me want to follow through and find out. Thankfully, Conrad was a prolific author, and he certainly has better works in his catalog than this. Unless you’re a true Conrad aficionado, stick with his greatest hits—Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Victory—and steer clear of this inauspicious debut.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2G95OVYS35XK6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Promises more than it delivers
Victory is a novel by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1915, that takes place among the islands of Indonesia. Though subtitled “An Island Tale,’ the tropical setting is largely irrelevant, only serving to provide a remote island location for the action to take place, where danger is magnified by isolation. Axel Heyst, a failed businessman turned mysterious hermit, lives a solitary existence on a remote isle, amid the ruins of his defunct mining company. On a business trip to Surabaya, he meets Lena, a young musician in a women’s orchestra performing at his hotel. Lena’s position in the orchestra amounts to little more than indentured servitude, and her virtue is threatened by the amorous intentions of the hotel keeper, who already harbors a strong but unfounded dislike for Heyst. Heyst rescues Lena from her oppressive situation and whisks her off to his island where they fall in love. But when three dangerous criminals show up on the island, their idyll is violated, their lives are threatened, and their love for one another is tested.
At the heart of Victory is a thrilling tale of romance and adventure. Unfortunately, the story is undermined by Conrad’s stylistic choices in the telling of it. Conrad switches narrative voice from first to third person, changes perspective from one character to another, and jumps around chronologically, jumbling the sequence of events. All this literary gymnastics seems an unnecessary attempt to add structural complexity to an otherwise simple and straightforward plot. Psychological complexity, on the other hand, is where Conrad truly excels. The characters are vividly drawn and quite memorable, with realistic motivations. Heyst seeks to withdraw himself from human concerns and resign himself to fate, but ultimately love forces him to reclaim his humanity and challenge his destiny. With the coming of the intruders, Lena, having had little control over her mostly unfortunate life, finds herself for the first time in a position to take some command over her own fate, a position she finds liberating despite the danger. The three desperadoes who seek to prey upon the lovers are deliciously creepy characters. In Conrad’s day they must have been quite shocking, and even now, almost a hundred years later, they are as chilling as any of the villains in today”s movies. There are some moments of gripping suspense in this novel that rival any of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Overall, however, Conrad’s constant examination in minutiae of each character’s every movement, thought, and feeling greatly hinders the momentum of what could have been a taut thriller. The story would have been better served by more action and dialogue, with fewer interior monologues and soliloquies. Ultimately the psycho-philosophical novel and the noir thriller both contained within these pages compete with one another and cancel each other out. The book ends up amounting to a long, drawn-out buildup to a brief and far from satisfying ending. Despite its keen insights into human nature, Victory leaves the reader feeling he has invested his time in a mediocre work by an exceptional author.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R18PR82DKHM1KC/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
