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The Rescue by Joseph Conrad

The Rescue
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Joseph Conrad is one of my favourite authors, so I was delighted to find a second-hand copy of this in the Penguin Classics paperback edition. I’ve read pretty much everything else he wrote but for some reason I had overlooked this one. While it isn’t especially rare, it is one of the more neglected novels in the author’s later works; it also has the interesting position of being a book that was originally started at the very beginning of his career, then set aside and only finished near the end of his life. You could even call it the last really big book he ever completed — though I do think that ‘The Rover’, which came later, was all the finer for its relative brevity. I don’t think it’s amongst his best work, or even his second-best, so I couldn't recommend it to new readers; but there’s a great deal here that will be of interest to those who are fans of this writer’s work.

The plot is one of those things that is simple to summarise but which is rendered complex by its execution. It follows the exploits of one Tom Lingard, a sort of roving sailor and 'adventurer' in what would now be called the Malay archipelago. Lingard comes upon a yacht which has run aground on a sandbank; the residents of the yacht are Mr and Mrs Travers, a sort of parody of a late-Edwardian gentleman with his intelligent and fiercely independent wife; D’Alcacer, a cool and observant diplomat; and Carter, who does all the actual sailing for the Travers couple. What these people don’t realise is that their arrival has come directly between Lingard’s work in restoring the kingdom of Hassim and Immada, the prince and princess of a tiny Malaysian kingdom who Lingard previously rescued from exile. What follows is a kind of delicate juggling operation between the immediate needs of the rescued white Europeans at sea with Lingard’s responsibilities to a tangled and ever-changing political situation on land.

What complicates things further is a situation rare in Conrad’s work: the presence of a love affair. It’s not that this is exactly done poorly, but it seems to me that the model here is Henry James above all else, to the extent that the author has all but abandoned his own style in pursuit of the grand Jamesian manner. And so there is rather a lot of stylised dialogue which is somehow mannered and teasing and tedious all at once; lots of talk and very little action. The whole form will probably seem unrecognisable to those readers who have only previously enjoyed ‘Heart of Darkness’ or ‘Lord Jim’, but I suspect this is best considered as an evolution of an authorial method which was already emerging in books like ‘Chance’ and (the highly underrated) ‘Victory’.

What this also has in common with those novels is Conrad’s interest in strong female figures. Mrs Travers is a great example of this, and feels very much to me like an attempt to invoke a heroine in the vein of James: smart and passionate while also being tightly constrained by propriety but also her own idealism. The key relationship is between her and Lingard, but there’s also D’Alcacer, who is supposedly also in love with her; if this were really a Henry James novel, D’Alcacer would probably be one of those cold-blooded protagonist-narrators, but by separating him from the actual narrative in ‘The Rescue’, Conrad is able to set up this Jamesian perspective as a slightly different thing to the structure of his novel as a whole.

The book also notable for its depiction of a foreign civilisation; unlikes those aforementioned early novels, there’s little sense here of the Malaysians as an ‘other’ who only serve to respect the unknowable aspects of their white masters. Instead, they are presented as developed and admirable characters in their own right, being active players in a well-developed political society — and the privileged whites who look down on them are also the most ridiculous figures in the book.

So far I’ve summarised this book as if it were a kind of love story, but there’s a great deal of darkness here too. The mysterious white-suited figure of Jorgenson looms about the margins of this story; an old white sailor with a somewhat mysterious past, he harbours a kind of hollowness reminiscent of all those men Marlow encountered in the deep colonial outposts of the Congo. Like the Professor in ‘The Secret Agent’, he is a nihilist, with a casual contempt for the everyday value of human life.

Jorgenson is a puzzle. On one hand I wonder if he was included simply to add shades of gloom to the corners, as if that was what his readers were expecting; but on the other, his appearances are so scene-stealing that I can’t help but feel that he might contain some secret inner desire of the author to be done with the world, a desire so dangerous it must be personified in the character of a madman. Indeed, there is a reoccurring sense throughout this book — manifest from various perspectives — of someone who is not only alienated by their society, but who is actively repelled by it, who even wants to destroy it.

Of course you couldn’t write that directly in a novel in 1920, I suppose. But It’s most haunting regardless. Look at the ridicule inherent in the masterful flashes of bitter irony in this little passage, for example, in which the author inhabits D'Alcacer as he considers the possibility of his imminent execution:

'He wondered also how far he had been sincere and how far affected by a very natural aversion from being murdered obscurely by ferocious Moors with all the circumstances of barbarity. It was a very naked death to come upon one suddenly. It was robbed of all helpful illusions, such as the free will of a suicide, the heroism of a warrior, or the exaltation of a martyr. "Hadn't I better make some sort of fight of it?" he debated with himself. He saw himself rushing at the naked spears without any enthusiasm. Or wouldn't it be better to go forth to meet his doom (somewhere outside the stockade on that horrible beach) with calm dignity. "Pah! I shall be probably speared through the back in the beastliest possible fashion," he thought with an inward shudder. It was certainly not a shudder of fear, for Mr. d'Alcacer attached no high value to life. It was a shudder of disgust because Mr. d'Alcacer was a civilized man and though he had no illusions about civilization he could not but admit the superiority of its methods. It offered to one a certain refinement of form, a comeliness of proceedings and definite safeguards against deadly surprises...'

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Reading Progress

April 4, 2014 –Started Reading

April 11, 2014 –Finished Reading

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