Dedicated to classics and hits.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

The Shadow Line (1917) by Joseph Conrad



Book Review
The Shadow Line (1917)
by Joseph Conrad

    I could make the case that a major reason so few people read Conrad today- late Conrad, in particular is mostly because people don't read fiction about the sea the same way they did in the past.  There were entire centuries when "the sea" was a primary theater for adventure narrative with a huge, popular audience.   If you go back and look at the original publication of Conrad's bibliography, there are many serials in adventure dominated periodicals, and the explicit marketing of his books was in the "master of adventure" line.  It is not entirely clear to me that Conrad was fully appreciated in his time, and today he has been a passive victim of the re-ordering of the literary canon along more diverse lines.  Heart of Darkness is a contested book in high schools and university and The Secret Agent has diminished in importance in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War.   Only Nostromo, with its Latin American setting, has seen a rise in relevance, but not enough to offset the exclusion of Heart of Darkness.

  Published in 1917, The Shadow Line is the last of his books that is commonly read.  After The Shadow Line you've got The Arrow of Gold, The Rescue and The Rover, three books I've never seen in print, or read about.   The Shadow Line is like a refinement of his earlier themes in Almayer's Folly and Lord Jim.  The events of The Shadow Line involve a young captain/narrator who remains nameless. he starts out in Singapore, ventures out to retrieve a boat which has lost its captain, and along the way back become becalmed and suffers the loss of his crew from a mysterious illness. 

  Critics over the years have pointed out that The Shadow Line, told conventionally back to front in time, lacks the modernist touches of his earlier, canonical books, but what struck me was the absence of incident.  Literally nothing happens.  That is modernist AF even if you aren't catapulting back and forth in time. 

Blog Archive