Review: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
When I spent some time in South East Asia, I rather belatedly became aware of the diversity and the complexity of history and politics in the region, and the power exerted by the sea on the livelihoods of people. I picked Lord Jim — a book that I had always wanted to read — in part, due to the hope that it would offer a colonial perspective into the region at the turn of the last century.
Compared to many writers of repute, Joseph Conrad’s prose is remote and difficult to read, just for delight. The writing is dense, “hard” and unforgiving. I trudged through every page; Several times, I retraced the pages that I had read before, in the fear of missing something. Copious literary talent and an extraordinary attention to detail abound in this book. Conrad disregards the plot often and writes vividly about the passage of time on sea and sea-faring. (Much like Stanislaw Lem’s intricate descriptions of scientific phenomena in his books – descriptions that evoke a sense of place and the disquietude of alien settings, while ambling the plot along).
Some of the difficulty in the accessibility of Lord Jim is due to the fact that it is an astonishing technical exercise, well ahead of its time. In Lord Jim, Conrad tries out an arsenal of writing and story-telling techniques — a story within a story, an unreliable narrator, a non-linear time structure including flash-forwards, and switches in point-of-view.
Conrad also wrote the book in English (his third language) which he had learned to speak in his twenties! As I trudged through the complexity of his bleak, break-less prose, I could not but be impressed with his austere control of narration, and his ability to bottle words to the plunging depths of pessimism.
Ultimately, the highlight of the book is not its technique or the early 20th-century sea-faring adventure, but the story of guilt and redemption. As I read Conrad, I was also reminded of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story, Floating Weeds). Much like Ozu’s movies, the narrative and localized descriptions in the book are devoid of flashiness, to the point of being mundane. However, the canvas of ideas that erupts mysteriously through those passages, is wide and as expansive as the world itself, wrapping all human suffering locked in remembrance of the past.
The guilt of inaction.
We dream of heroism and of doing the right thing.
What would we do when we learn of our inability to make simple sacrifices in adherence to duty? Is our sense of duty fungible?
How will we then choose between long lives laden with guilt and heroic death?
Lord Jim is a story of a man, who when faced with the choice, chose to abandon others to save himself, but eventually crumbling under the weight of inability to forgive himself.
Lord Jim is a novel in two parts. In the first part, Jim is a first mate on Patna – a ship carrying pilgrims – which begins to sink. Jim loses his sense of duty and jumps ship with the crew, abandoning the pilgrims without lifeboats to their watery graves. Miraculously, Patna does not sink, and the pilgrims are all saved. Most members of the crew disappear, but Jim honorably chooses to face trial and the ensuing disgrace (both external and internal). Consumed with guilt, he is unable to hold on to any job. Eventually, he reaches the remote island of Patusan, to escape and to dissolve slowly in his guilt. His road to redemption in Patusan, strewn with errors and deaths, forms the second part of the book.
Lord Jim excels as a story of internal guilt, a lifelong search for redemption, and a corrosive desire to face comeuppance for one’s nefarious past. As to the destinies and futures of pilgrims and the colonies, it offers very little. Surely, there are tales of guilt in the pilgrims’ visions of impending deaths. What does it mean to lay our entwined destinies down to the weapons and ships devised by strangers riding the winds of time?
We don’t know.
I wondered about Dain Waris — heroic and ephemeral. We learn very little about Dain or other residents of Patusan. They remain nothing but waylaid instruments and mute observers of Jim’s descent to his eventual destiny.
Their stories too, are aching to be told.