Many years ago I saw the movie 'Lord Jim' with Peter O'Toole and I thought it was a great flick with a lot of depth and very thought-provoking. It is one of my favorite films. So, I thought I would read the book since I've often found books to be even better than the movie. But, in this case I was sorely disappointed. The book, to me, was very hard to read with exceedingly long sentences and paragraphs and written almost in a 'stream-of-conciousness' mode as told by a third person. I found this to be true of Conrad's 'Nostromo' as well and have to admit that I failed to finish either book because of the cumbersome writing style. Perhaps, I am not smart enough to understand the writing style. In any case, may advice is to watch the movie which I found to be much more enjoyable.

Like other reviewers I was introduced to this book at a young age. Although I was too young to understand much, it intrigued me then as it intrigues me now - this prototypical theme about one who leaves the numbing monotony of uninspired domestic life for the romanticism of going to sea and distant lands. Certainly, the romanticism of youth and then the subsequent disillusionment of experience, in this case a bitter twist of fate, was a subject of grave concern for Conrad, and that concern is sounded in the powerful language that comes out through the narrator Marlow. As Marlow relates, "There is a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures... in no other kind of life is the beginning all illusion - the disenchantment more swift - the subjugation more complete". Or this: "Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone - and as short-lived, alas." Stein, the merchant and butterfly collector had an enigmatic answer to this romanticism: "in the destructive element submit."

Of interest here is the historical context within which this book was written. It appears as if an actual historical incident, the abandonment by the crew of the British ship Jeddah carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca in 1880, serves as a basis for the story. It was during a time when Great Britain had amassed a great overseas empire and had come to dominate the trade routes to the East; and also when racist attitudes abounded, supported by the science of the day. At one point, Marlow pauses in his narrative to wonder if all this enterprise into foreign lands could have arisen solely out of greed, and cannot come up with any other motives other than to benefit loved ones back home.

Jim's downfall has a great deal to do with the fringe characters that cross his path. None of the crew of the Patna seem to be anything but self-indulgent and self-serving; exactly the kind of people one would expect to run for their lives rather than face a responsibility for something larger than themselves. It was Jim's fate as a youth to suffer the inaction of being pulled along with these cowards. Marlow went out of his way to extend his sympathy to Jim, seeing in him a different sensibility, as "one of us". But then again, although it's not exactly clear - "obscured in mists" as Marlow would say, he had something in common with that crew. He seems to have had his head in the clouds, thinking about his own adventures rather than his duty to the passengers. Later, when he is banished to Patusan and becomes a revered figure to the natives there and is on his way to redeeming himself and finding love - at least in that one corner of the world - he crosses paths with two outcasts, the egomaniac pirate Gentleman Brown and the abject Cornelius. Then a twist of fate...

A Grand Ungodly Godlike Narrator, November 22, 2008
By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews

That title is a knock-off of Ishmael's description of Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick. My guess is that Joseph Conrad never read Moby Dick. His writing career unfolded during the decades before the rediscovery of Melville. I have no doubt that Conrad would have burst with appreciation if he'd encountered the other "greatest" writer of sea tales in English or any language. Lord Jim begins to remind me of Moby Dick in chapter four, when the straightforward 3rd person narrative suddenly shifts to Conrad's typically indirect narration in the first person voice of Captain Marlow. Thereafter, Jim's whole adventure is embedded in Marlow's rambling discourse, to the utter despair of high school sophomores and middle-age armchair travelers who "just want the story, ma'm."

So who is Marlow? Is he just a convenient mask for Conrad? Why is so much text devoted to Marlow's musing about his own "peripheral" role in the story and his own unresolved understanding of Jim? Does "Jim" really exist, outside of Marlow's penchant for entertaining friends with bizarre anecdotes? (The last few chapters, cast as a letter from Marlow to a friend, would seem to be intended to 'document' the truth of the tale.) Dear reader, you've better notice that Jim is remarkably inarticulate in Marlow's account; when he speaks, he almost never finishes a sentence, never establishes a discourse on his own terms. The Jim we get to know is as much a projection of Marlow's ego as Jesus of Nazareth was of the Apostle Paul's. And then, of course, we still have to wonder about the invisible author behind the so-obtrusive narrator.

What I'm arguing here is that the novel Lord Jim is about as much about the title character as Moby Dick is about the whale. Ahab's quest for ineffable vengeance by death is almost exactly parallel to Jim's quest for redemption by death. Both are ripping good adventure tales that COULD be told in eighty-page novellas or made into films from which the narrative voices are stripped and scattered on the floor of the editing studio. But just as the main character in Moby Dick is Ishmael, Marlow is the heart of obscurity in Lord Jim. To really relish either book, the reader has to take the narrator's epiphanies seriously.

Are we on any kind of solid ground in saying that Melville's novel is about a socially orphaned Ishmael projecting his need for a father Ahab? Shall we then risk the notion that Conrad's novel is about a psychologically impotent Marlow projecting his need for a son on Tuan Jim? Hey, reader! If you steal my notion and write a grad seminar paper with it, don't forget to vote "helpful" on my review!

This is an absurdly great novel, a book to read thoughtfully with mounting involvement until you can't attend to anything else before finishing it, a book to read again and again as your life changes perspective on itself. If you have doubts about Conrad's mastery of the English language, listen to this description:
"... we watched the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight. There is something haunting in the light of the moon... It is to our sunshine, which -- say what you like -- is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note by mocking or sad." That extended metaphor, to my mind, sets up perfectly the mood and the narrative thrust of Marlow's first long 'confessional' conversation with the disgraced sailor Jim, in which self-mockery and sadness afflict both parties.

I'd forgotten, or never realized, how deep this novel is, since I first read it perhaps twenty years ago. I hope I can come upon it with the same freshness and astonishment when I read it again, perhaps twenty years from now.