communication breakdown

Book Review: Lord Jim (1900)

[ 1 / 10 ] A young, adventurous sailor finds himself in the middle of a terrible storm that leads to shipwreck, and resorts to abandoning the ship in order to save his life. He finds himself standing trial alone for his actions (whether cowardly, misguided, or both) and is stripped of title and disgraced. With nowhere left to turn he flees to a remote forgotten island, and earns redemption by becoming a leader of the people and saving them from those who attempt to do them harm. Sounds like an interesting premise, right? Well, Joseph Conrad finds a way to take a promising outline and make it insufferable in his supposed classic Lord Jim. Conrad, best known for his other supposed classic Heart of Darkness, has a bona fide talent for sucking life out of a story like a vacuum. I found Lord Jim to be an exercise in patience and willpower; it was solely my unwillingness to quit in the middle of a book that propelled me toward its finish. After 9 months, I finally reached the end; by comparison, I immediately began and then finished another book in a matter of days. What we have here is a charming little short story that is stretched to the limit with meandering dialogue and cumbersome prose, and the result is like butter spread too thinly on toast...

Jim is an intriguing enough character; he is brash, fearless, and has an acute sense of romanticism. He is loyal to a fault and is exceptional at his trade. Of course, when the shipwreck occurs and he finds his trustworthiness questioned and his character vilified, he becomes a self-deprecating wretch looking for a corner in which to hide. Yet, the flame of his passion is never quite extinguished; it simply lays dormant until it is coaxed into the open by a simple, naive group of helpless natives who look to him for protection against powerful external forces. Again, as a character study it sounds interesting; the problem is in the presentation and execution.

Rather than retelling the story directly from Jim as narrator, instead it is told from the point of view of Marlow, a man present at Jim's trial who takes a liking to him and helps him find solace on the forgotten island. Practically the entire story is told as a recanting of a conversation; a vast majority of the story is quoted, and there are frequent nested quotes, making it extremely difficult to determine who is talking. And if that weren't bad enough, the dialogue is hopelessly dated; so much so that it is hard to navigate. It is not difficult in a Shakespearian way (which is mostly a matter of antiquated vocabulary), but rather it was the formally structured speech that is often tangential and cyclical in nature. Despite being over a hundred years old, I have a hard time believing that people ever spoke in the way that Conrad suggested they do; if they did, I scarcely believe they would ever successfully communicate anything at all.

In 300 tedious pages, Conrad brings Jim's character through the full cycle of pride to desperation to redemption, and by the time he's done you don't really care. I suffered through great lengths of the story just trying to keep pace with who is talking and what they're trying to say. It is almost as if Conrad gets in the way of his own telling of the story; maybe if he had been less focused on writing a great book, and instead allowed the story to emerge out of the great premise, he might have created something truly classic. I don't presume to suggest that anyone who considers this book to be a great read to be wrong; but for my part, I can't see anything worthwhile here, which is a shame considering what could have been.