Just Finished Reading: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (FP: 1900) [261pp] 

Jim was a dreamer. As a boy he dreamed of two things, being at sea and being a hero just like the heroes in the books he devoured. Almost before he realised it his first dream became a reality and he loved every moment of it. His second dream, unfortunately eluded him until on the darkest of nights he woke to the sound of a loud bang. The ship he was travelling in, as a young crew member, had hit something and stopped dead in the water. With a small crew but a large contingent of pilgrims on their way to the Arabian coast, this was a heroic moment if ever there was one. What was Jim to do? The answer stunned him – he would do nothing. Shamed in the most public way possible Jim had no other option than to hide from the public gaze and move on whenever he was recognised. His only salvation, the only way to regain his sense of self, his sense of purpose, his very soul, was to be a hero and when he was presented with such an opportunity he jumped at it – with consequences beyond even his imagination. 

This is my 2nd Conrad after reading The Secret Agent some years ago. I was expecting a fairly standard late-Victorian Imperial adventure story and was more than a little surprised by what I actually found. This definitely could have been a by-the-numbers adventure. It certainly had all of the elements to work with. But the author did much more than that, he went deeper. The focus, as you might be able to guess from the title is Jim himself. He is, again, in some ways an obvious hero and the story seems to have an obvious naïve boy to mature adult redemption arch but, again, it's much more than that. Jim is driven by his childhood dreams and the guilt he feels because of his first failure to live up to his own exaggerated standards. Given the opportunity he leans into his saviour complex but only becomes a real hero (much to his own surprise) when reality bites – hard. 

I found this to be an interesting if slow (for me anyway!) read. Part of that was that it regularly upset my expectations. But one of the strangest aspects of the novel, which honestly took some time to get my head around, was its style. Briefly we start with a typical ‘gods-eye’ view of things showing us Jim’s early life. We then switch to the main event where the narrator – a Captain Marlow – is clearly relating his meeting with Jim and subsequent interactions to an audience. Lastly, and briefly, we get another point of view where one of that audience reads about Jim meeting his final destiny from a letter written by Marlow. This seemed to me to be, well, rather odd. I did think, musing on it, that it might have been the author hinting both at the distance between being Jim and seeing Jim from the outside as well as the difficulty of actually knowing another person – no matter the length or depth of the interactions. Time and again we are presented with the apparent mystery of Jim’s behaviour. No one seems to understand his actions, though I suspect until the very end and his moment of revelation that Jim himself didn’t fully understand why he did what he did. 

Although I can’t honestly say that I loved this book, it did have a haunting quality that has stuck with me. The writing is often beautiful and at times quite sublime. I found myself pausing to read a sentence or passage out loud more than once just to hear the quality of the composition. For a relatively short novel this has real depth and I can see why it established Conrad as one of the great storytellers of the 20th century. Recommended.