Lord Jim (1900)

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Fiction

If you’ve heard that Joseph Conrad wrote sea tales and come to Lord Jim expecting a Hornblower tale, you’ll be disappointed. Conrad’s first-hand experience of the sea in its many moods is evident. But the sea is merely the canvas; Conrad’s real subject is the depths of the heart, the vagaries of the human psyche. In this, Conrad’s books are similar to those of a contemporary novelist, Henry James.
The title character of the book appears and disappears, yet is the center of the book. Most of what we learn about Jim is third hand, as is much of the action of the plot. Almost all of the book, from chapter 5 to chapter 35, is told by a seaman only identified as Marlow, who also narrates Heart of Darkness. It’s an interesting narration technique: between us, the readers, and the protagonist stands the author, the nameless narrator who recounts what he heard from Marlow, who for his part, fills in what he heard directly from Jim with the accounts of other memorable characters such as Stein and Gentleman Brown. This distances us from the action. Marlow’s comment about Jim in chapter 21, “It is only through me that he exists for you,” is a reminder from Conrad of what is true about all fiction.
From childhood, Jim dreamed of performing heroic deeds. Stein, one of the many memorable secondary characters, diagnoses him, without ever meeting him, as a romantic. Yet when Jim twice finds himself in a situation calling for action—not even something heroic, but no more than would be expected of any seaman—he freezes. An understandable lapse, except that Jim cannot forgive himself, especially after the second incident, which leaves him stripped of his seaman’s papers. Jim can’t live with the discrepancy between his imagined ideal of himself and the reality of his failure, so he tries to disappear—running not so much from others as from himself.
Marlow slips into acting as his patron, arranging a series of positions for him, from which Jim flees every time his identity is revealed. Finally, Jim achieves some measure of peace in the remote trading station of Patusan, sent to be the agent of Stein. It isn’t long before he lives up to his image of himself, becoming the Tuan, the lord of the local population, and finding love with a woman he calls Jewel, stepdaughter of the corrupt agent he displaces. The idyll can’t last, of course. The last few chapters of this book, once a malevolent agent of destiny enters, were nearly unbearable to read. It seems as if Jim can only be destroyed by his evil twin, another product of Britain’s “us,” that is, the “right people.” Yet, like Jim, Gentleman Brown has been deformed by his experience of the South Seas. Whereas for Jim, the deformity takes the form of a naive devotion to honor, Brown has lost all sense of it.
All in all, this book is a well-told tale, written in rich late-nineteenth-century prose. Conrad, like Henry James, can strike the modern reader as long-winded. He often takes three sentences to say what writers today might say in one. This doesn’t strike me as padding, however. Instead, the expansiveness serves a purpose. It’s not for speed-reading but savoring. ( )

A book for everyone to read. The story is an exploration of the expression of ego in a man of action. Or it is about redemption after the awakening to sin and human weakness. At any rate it is a character study viewed through the lens of a flawed narrator, fascinating, and due to be recalled continuously after the work has been read. Jim does wrong, but after being brought to understand that, how does he choose to live? There is an exotic milieu and colourful challenges, and Conrad's marvelous prose to enjoy. The book began to influence the world in 1900. ( )