The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows by Joseph Conrad

 

This is the third book in Conrad's "Lingard Trilogy," coming after his first and second novels, 
 Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Though Conrad began The Rescue not long after finishing Outcast, it was not published until twenty years later, twenty years during which Conrad published masterpieces like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo. The Conrad who composed the final version of The Rescue was, therefore, a much more mature and confident writer than the neophyte of Almayer's Folly.

The novel is gripping from start to finish. Conrad wrote of the novel, "I want to make it a kind of glorified book for boys – you know. No analysis. No damned mouthing. Pictures – pictures – pictures. That's what I want to do," and he succeeds in exactly what he set out to do. The novel pulls one along just as boy's adventures should, and the atmosphere he creates of the tropical archipelago where the novel is set sucks us in. Reading it we feel that we enter a world apart. When forced to put the book down we are loath to leave that world.

What "glorifies" the book, though, what makes it something more than a Boys' Own Adventure, is the profound moral dilemma Captain Lingard faces between passion and loyalty. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield

Image
  Katherine Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf, “We have got the same job, Virginia, & it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it.”  Woolf, as far as I know, didn't deny it. In fact, she wrote: “I was jealous of [Mansfield's] writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Woolf, it should be noted, was not known for praising her contemporaries. One can see why she felt this way about Mansfield whose stories are each little gems, made more gem-like by the author's fastidiousness in avoiding crude effects. Unremarkable people are observed, and things and animals almost as much as people. The people do their best. There is never a big bang or clanking epiphany at the end. Rather, there is a hint that things probably won't change, life, for better or worse, will go on. (Pictured above is the edition I read. The cover is a detail fro...
Read more

Going Forward: An Introduction.

 Eighteen years ago, some friends and I started a blog. Back in the day I used to post there about a variety of things. Then the energy to do those kinds of posts got sucked onto Facebook, and I pretty much stopped writing on the blog. The one thing I did continue to do was to use it as a place to write short squibs about the books I'd read. Now Typepad, the host of that blog, Only a Blockhead , has announced that they're closing up shop. Those squibs will vanish into air (and the link to Blockhead will die soon). I've decided, though, to continue writing squibs about the culture I consume—mostly books, perhaps movies (if I ever watch another movie) music, etc. I don't plan to do any other sort of writing here (but who knows?). I suppose the blog will be little read by anyone other than me, but with my memory being rather random access, it's good to have a record of what I've consumed. The blog is ugly now, but I will try to make it prettier by and bye. —David
Read more

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Image
  Oppression. Repression. Depression.  The first certainly contributes to the second, and both contribute to the third in the character of the protagonist of Villette , Lucy Snowe. This is a meticulous account of a woman who is depressed and introverted (both terms that were probably not current when Brontë was writing this novel). Perhaps traumatized (another word probably not much used in this way until Freud's time ) by her parents' deaths, Lucy builds walls around herself, denies even to herself the passionate and very human desire she feels. She stays behind the walls she has constructed as the man who has engendered this passion first develops an attraction to an air-headed society girl, and then to a more admirable young woman with whom he is happy. She finally finds happiness herself with a man who, not least because of his misogyny and ardent Catholicism (Lucy is an ardent Protestant), is often unpleasant and with whom Lucy is often at odds. The novel ends, though, wi...
Read more