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A review by hadeanstars
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
3.0
For me, this became a slog. The first third of the book was excellent, and really explored some profound and meaningful issues about guilt, shame, responsibility and redemption. Jim, a mate aboard the passenger steamer Patna, in a moment of confusion and panic, abandons ship at the behest of his crewmates. Wrongly, it transpires as the ship does not sink and all they have abandoned is their passengers and their duty to them. Jim's crewmates, certainly a gang of reprobates at best, abandon him too, leaving him alone to face justice and conviction. This sets the motive force for the remainder of the novel, which becomes increasingly hard to enjoy. Oh where to even start?
The beginning chapters are told in the third person and are very well composed. After this it becomes of muddle of first-person narrators, we are never quite sure who, with increasingly tenuous modes of delivery. At the end, the narrator of - I believe - Heart of Darkness, Charles Marlow, espouses the story by various means, either in telling it over cigars after dinner, or even in letters to some unnamed recipient.
Another issue is the heroic mien that Conrad projects onto Jim, who is otherwise rather fallible and ordinary, if troubled, but not so much in the brooding manner of romantic heroes so much as the awkward and rather self-absorbed manner of ordinary men. The entire manner of writing is uncomfortable, voyeuristic and slightly obsessive, but never urgent or particularly compelling.
And this is the major issue for me. It just drags. Vast tracts are devoted to explaining very little in terms of character development or plot. Some of the description is nice and evocative, but this hardly rescues it.
And then there is the incipient racism of the whole thing, with Jim being the great white lord whom all the natives seem to worship for the same obscure reasons that Conrad does. In truth I only continued with this because the first part had been good and I thought that it must surely return to form eventually. Sadly it did not.
But all was ultimately revealed. I learned after reading that Conrad originally wrote this as short story (the first third I would imagine), and became enamoured of his character, so decided to make of him a full length novel. As a result it has that weird dual nature a la Waugh's Handful of Dust (a much better novel for all it's disjointed middle), allied with it being stretched too thin. Like making a small book like the Hobbit into a triple movie franchise.
Apart from the first part, the only redeeming quality for me was the echo of Heart of Darkness. Was Conrad trying to make an allusion to Kurtz? Certainly the method is the same and there are many similarities. But it's not enough for me.
The beginning chapters are told in the third person and are very well composed. After this it becomes of muddle of first-person narrators, we are never quite sure who, with increasingly tenuous modes of delivery. At the end, the narrator of - I believe - Heart of Darkness, Charles Marlow, espouses the story by various means, either in telling it over cigars after dinner, or even in letters to some unnamed recipient.
Another issue is the heroic mien that Conrad projects onto Jim, who is otherwise rather fallible and ordinary, if troubled, but not so much in the brooding manner of romantic heroes so much as the awkward and rather self-absorbed manner of ordinary men. The entire manner of writing is uncomfortable, voyeuristic and slightly obsessive, but never urgent or particularly compelling.
And this is the major issue for me. It just drags. Vast tracts are devoted to explaining very little in terms of character development or plot. Some of the description is nice and evocative, but this hardly rescues it.
And then there is the incipient racism of the whole thing, with Jim being the great white lord whom all the natives seem to worship for the same obscure reasons that Conrad does. In truth I only continued with this because the first part had been good and I thought that it must surely return to form eventually. Sadly it did not.
But all was ultimately revealed. I learned after reading that Conrad originally wrote this as short story (the first third I would imagine), and became enamoured of his character, so decided to make of him a full length novel. As a result it has that weird dual nature a la Waugh's Handful of Dust (a much better novel for all it's disjointed middle), allied with it being stretched too thin. Like making a small book like the Hobbit into a triple movie franchise.
Apart from the first part, the only redeeming quality for me was the echo of Heart of Darkness. Was Conrad trying to make an allusion to Kurtz? Certainly the method is the same and there are many similarities. But it's not enough for me.