Joseph Conrad

Reading Joseph Conrad is a pleasure. Sometimes it is a pain when it appears too tedious or improbable. But some stories, like Karain, or An Outpost of Progress, or Amy Foster, are gems. Outpost of progress deals with the degeneration of two Europeans in an ivory trading post in Africa. Karain is about betrayal. Amy Foster is again about betrayal.

In An Outpost of Progress, the debilitating effects of isolation gnawing away the insides of two people far away from home in a strange land is examined. The moral dissolution of two perfectly well meaning men who look upon each like school friends, collapsing into loathing and distrust, whose mutual hatred eventually finishes off one of them and the subsequent guilt claims the other, is the main theme. And in the background of this is the charater of Henry Price, the native on the trading post, who stands by like the simple underlying theme of a complicated orchestra. He offers contrast and depth. He acts as a canvas on which the events are painted and the story unfolds, with his deceptively simple method of skulking silently as the solution to every problem, trusting to the indifference of man and the lure of a commonly acceptable solution, and, so to speak, personifies the darkness developing in the minds of the two men. But there is a modicum of redemption for the murderer: he feels contrite enough to kill himself.

Karain, as I said, talks about betrayal. It is set in the east. It is about a native who betrays his bosom friend; in fact kills him, for the sake of an illusion which has him under its sway. It is the mysterious illusion of love. And finally the illusion, for which he has killed his close friend, lets him down; it betrays him. He sees that it was as intangible as a shadow. He has killed his friend for nothing. After this he is haunted by the ghost of his treachery, which is exorcised in a rather droll way by his European friends.

Amy Foster is about the utter isolation of a castaway from a ship wreck, shunned and reviled by all but a plain looking, kind hearted girl, and who is fated to remain forever alone and to die alone, misunderstood and forsaken, deserted in death even by the girl whom he loves, but who loves him no longer, her mind poisoned by the constant slander she hears said of him.

The descriptions are vivid and breathtaking. Conrad has a knack of using a word or a phrase in the unlikeliest of contexts and yet convey the precise shade of meaning which no other word could have done. The psychological insights are, well, insightful. Perhaps the only drawback, which I'm afraid is reflected in this post, is that the sentences at times tend to be long and cumbersome, interrupted by countless commas, which make them extremely irritating. Probably the last sentence just illustrates what I mean! But I'm sure it's not as bad as Conrad.

Also, the narrative techniques sometimes appear contrived and don't quite ring true. And so is the occasional tendency to digress and indulge in fits of descriptions.

But all said and done, I'm grateful for having discovered Conrad. It's a very satisfying experience to read his works. Let's see how much I can imbibe from him.