1001+ Books:
#2 - Lord Jim
by: Joseph Conrad (1900)
This is not an easy read. It is confusing, wordy, and longwinded. I wouldn't call it boring, but I would call it dragging. Its timezones shift, its narrators switch, and all unexpectedly, with little to no indication when things are happening or who's telling the story, at least until it is halfway through its transferring from one to the other. I don't like it when books make me feel slow, but at least this one isn't condescending; just kind of a pain in the ass. A slog, a grind, a hard time, and By Jove! is it not a lot of fun. I will say that it gets easier as you go, but unfortunately it also gets more repetitive as well, at least until the third act. Almost the entire book is in quotations, which doesn't make a lot of sense. It insists on being in the third person, but most of the book is narrated by Marlow (a funny coincidence considering my last book I read in the 1001, The Big Sleep, and how completely different the two characters who share the name are), who is constantly in those confines because the first chapter or two is from the POV of an omnipresent narrator. It's like reading a book that is entirely in comic word bubbles, with all the dialogue in smaller word bubbles inside those bubbles.
The story is this: Jim, just Jim, at least at first, is a young seafarer who dreams of adventure and heroism that comes with the seaman's life. He is hired aboard the Patna, a ship carrying four hundred Muslim migrants from one land to another. One night, he and the crew notice something wrong with the ship, and convinced it is going to sink, ditch it and its passengers in an attempt to save themselves. Only the ship doesn't sink, and they all have to be rescued, disgraced as sailors in the line of duty, especially Jim who feels an incredible sense of guilt over the whole thing. The second act of the book concerns, from Marlows perspective - the man who would befriend Jim after the Patna disaster - what Jim does with his life and how he wrestles with his demons. This includes lots and lots of getting jobs, hearing something about the Patna, quitting the job in shame, finding a new job, having the same thing happen, and so on, and so forth, over, and over, and over again. Eventually, however, in the much more interesting third act, he finds a new start for himself, and heads for the uncolonized land of Patusan, where he meets a girl and falls in love, also obtaining the titular title of Lord Jim by helping out the people of said land. In the end (spoiler alert, but I doubt you're gonna read this, are you), after a major failure to his people, he walks out of Patusan in shame, much like he abandoned the Patna in the beginning. He is shot dead in the chest by a vengeful villager who's sons death he was partly responsible for.
Fate, it seems, is the main concern of Conrad's writing here. That, and nature. Not as much the nature of flowers and fruits and jungles, but the nature of men (and pointedly not so much women). Fate and nature seem to intertwine; can man decide his own fate, or is he subject to his own nature?Jim thought he could escape fate, and so did Marlow think so of him as well, but in the end his own inabilities as a man caught up with him and he was forced back into old habits: jumping ship. He realizes what he already suspected, despite his fortune and power in his new circumstances, he is not, and could never be, a god among men. Marlow describes Jim as being "one of us" throughout the text, despite also revering him as being on another plane of human existence almost. The villagers certainly see him as much, and treat him as having power short of a god. It is said, by Marlow, that he, himself, is not good enough. But he adds that neither is Jim, although he is as close as any man ever came. He makes an enigma out of him, one he is determined that cannot be solved, although it is more than likely he is willfully deluding himself into believing that, ignoring man's inherent nature of being much less complicated than it would like to be. The text is full of unclear, foggy notions about things, Marlow being constantly unable to articulate the magnitude of certain situations, or vague feelings. It makes Marlows narration both affirm his idea of the world being unsolvable, but possibly also refutes it in his unreliableness as a narrator (there are many of these in this book, but then again every narrator is, somehow, unreliable). Maybe fate acts with nature to the same outcome, proving that both are true phenomena in their own rights. In the end it is about surviving, which is in every mans nature and against all odds of fate.
This is a difficult book, as I've said, with profound ideas. One that is worth delving into. That is not to say I would recommend it to many, maybe not even very many at all. It is mostly not enjoyable, and while it begins and raps up powerfully, the middle is so goddamn hard to get through that it makes it almost unnecessary. It is rewarding in the end, and a powerful book at times, but ultimately the fruits of the labor do not quite outweigh the labor. That being said, when it is good, it is very good. The descriptions of Jim's feelings during the "sinking" of the Patna are so forceful and emotionally charged it causes one to almost feel they are going through the same thing, Jim's disappointment at the end of the book similarly so. If you are going to read this, be ready for a challenge, and be well prepared in your endurance beforehand, which is something I was not. On the bright side, most things you read after this are bound to be easy compared.
Rating: C
