The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad

This seemed such a slight tale, barely over 100 pages; but it worked its way into my imagination and finally left me with a renewed appreciation of Joseph Conrad as a writer.

There's a curious side to my reading this. I read a bunch of Conrad's novels when I was a student; I was especially taken with Victory, and then hugely impressed by Nostromo; and the clincher was the ever so sombre and downbeat The Secret Agent. I ended up electing to do a 'special paper' on Conrad for my literature degree. It won a decent grade, though if I'm honest I didn't have anything new or particular to say about the author. I think I simply wanted to indulge myself, writing about him. The odd thing is that Conrad was always generally known as a writer of tales about the sea, yet none of those books, or the others I read at that time, fell into that category. So, after all this time, I read The Shadow-Line, which most definitely is a story about life at sea.

To sum up, while in Singapore and in a funk about his direction in life, a young First Mate is offered his first command as captain, tasked to bring back a sailing vessel from Bangkok whose previous captain has died. Bangkok being pestilential, he sets off as soon as possible, only to find himself in a nightmare situation, for more than two weeks the ship is stuck in a dead calm, while almost the entire crew succumbs to tropical fever. Although there is no villain, exactly, it seems as if the malign spirit of the previous captain is hanging over the ship, until they can catch the merest breeze which will take them beyond 8 degrees - where the earlier captain was buried at sea. It seems many readers have misread this aspect, and assumed it to be a semi-supernatural tale. But it's very clear that it's more a belief held by one person especially, which threatens to infect the fevered brains of the crew. The lowest point is reached when the young captain makes a terrible discovery in the medicine chest; from there he faces his greatest test of character. The end of the story is almost offhand. At that point, the trial has been passed, and it's not to be dwelt on: life goes on.

You know, back in the old days I think I subconsciously avoided Conrad's sea stories. I might try suggesting that I had a notion about the sea stories being part of his early work, and less 'universal' than his later land-based (so to speak) fiction. But without being deliberately political at all, I think the title of one book in particular put me off, relating to the vessel known as the Narcissus. See, I can't even write the word here. Silly, I know, but it just put me off, and that feeling somehow transferred itself to the other maritime novels.

I've laid that mental glitch to rest now. It's more likely I'll return to Conrad sometime; maybe I'm appreciating things now which I couldn't before. On the one hand, the setting is almost irrelevant, since The Shadow-Line is about psyche and experience and a passage in life. On the other, the setting couldn't be more authentic. The unnamed central character is utterly convincing in his role as a highly capable mariner in his first command. Not only did Conrad live this life, the story is virtually autobiographical, in fact some of the names haven't been changed at all.

The thing which most demanded my attention and appreciation was his rendering of people. Is it this which makes him a literary great? It didn't strike me immediately, it's so nuanced and glancing, and for a while various characters seem thinly sketched, but that's so deceptive. Even when so many individuals are given single names, or even go nameless. Somehow, every one takes on a particular cast, a subtly different definition, and they change in our eyes ever so slightly as our protagonist matures and takes command of his ghastly situation.