British and Irish Literature Archives

Body and Soul – David Szalay’s Flesh

Flesh, the Booker-prize-winning novel by the British-Hungarian author David Szalay, is many things. So is its central figure, the Hungarian István, whose rags-to-riches-and-back tale covers more ground than many of us can expect to experience in our own lives, from soldiery in Iraq to bouncing at nightclubs in London and finally hobnobbing with politicians over billion-pound property developments. The mere accumulation of believably rendered scenes, however, is not what makes this interesting as fiction. Instead, it is Flesh’s rendering itself that is exciting. Through a bare, pared-down style, which is especially visible in its shockingly direct dialogue, the novel is a brilliant example of saying without stating and showing without quite telling.

The work’s title sets out its thematic scope right from the get-go. István is a man who appears to be someone wholly devoid of interiority or reflection – all body, no mind. He spends much of the book in a kind of passive role – things happen to him. Those things, often as not, involve sex. Whether that’s his sexual initiation at the hands of an older woman or the affair with his boss’s wife that sets off his rise to the upper reaches of British polite society, interlocking bodies are almost always involved. Despite his taciturnity and passivity, István succeeds in life. At least to a point. This result raises questions about whether such things as interiority and reflection are really necessary and has allowed some commentators on the novel to turn it into a kind of guide to practical stoicism.

Such a view is wrongheaded. If the novel shows that a man can reach the top of the world without interiority or reflection, that fact reflects poorly upon that world. So much is possible, certainly, except what truly matters – mainly, in this case, love. The view also downplays those little, quietly articulated, developments within the novel, that show István changing even as the world does not. The growth of his imagination and empathy, for example, and his attempts to move from passivity into a certain kind of activity. That none of this is ultimately rewarded says nothing against him. Instead, after so much time spent meditating on flesh, we are left wondering how the world and people might change if we wanted to value mind also.

Plot

István comes from relative anonymity in small-town Hungary and ends up, briefly, at the top of British polite society. During his rise, two things stand out: the role of chance, and that of his own relative passivity. An older woman begins his introduction to sex as a teenager, less with his consent, than with his compliance. When the affair is discovered, István and the woman’s husband fight, with the young man accidentally killing the older in a brawl. After his release from a young offender’s institute, István loafs. An attempt at intimacy with his uncle’s stepdaughter leads to him being rebuffed, but it plants the idea of joining the army in him. After a tour in Iraq and therapy for PTSD, he becomes a bouncer in the UK, where one night he comes across a man being attacked by a mugger. István doesn’t rescue him so much as make it impossible for the mugging to continue by crying out. Nevertheless, it’s enough.

The man saved, to István’s good fortune, runs a bodyguard service. After training, István receives as his clients a very wealthy Scandinavian couple, the Nymans, who divide their time between London and the countryside. The much-younger wife, Helen, begins an affair with István, which comes into the open after her husband’s death from cancer. For a few years, they enjoy their life openly. But her son from her marriage, Thomas, is destined to inherit everything from his father upon reaching the age of twenty-five. Thus István’s stint at the top becomes time-limited. The novel sketches out the shape of its arc early enough, even if the exact shape, the clicking together of the pieces of the decline, retains its capacity to surprise.

Chance and Passivity

The role of chance is so important within the novel because of István’s essential passivity, or at best reactivity. The older woman begins their affair by unexpectedly asking if she can kiss him. As for the heroism that fends off the mugger late at night, it’s described like this:

“Help,” a voice says.

The voice sounds strangely normal, like someone just neutrally saying the word.

Maybe it’s for that reason that he does nothing for a second or two.

Then he starts to move towards it, past the weakly lit display windows of the bookshop.

“Hey!” he shouts.

Which seems to be enough.

At key moments like these, István’s actions have been prompted by external stimuli, and always with delays, as if he is a simple, slow, organism. His PTSD centres upon his failure to rescue a friend from a burning military vehicle in time – for too long, he simply watched the flames in shock, he thinks. Even his language is reactive: “Sure, thanks.” “Okay.” I remember making a mental note when I first saw a sentence of dialogue from István which required a second line in the book – it was so unexpected.

Yet in spite of this essential reactivity, István’s ascent is meteoric. As a bouncer, then later as a bodyguard, he is in roles where his passivity and silence become virtues. Even with the women who fall for him, such as Helen Nyman, it seems that his reticence is taken by them as a sign that he can be trusted for a clandestine affair. Later, once he moves into British polite society, his lack of personality means that he can easily “fit in.” His interests, such as they eventually are, appear to be expensive cars and watches. He does not rock the boat. He barely makes it bob, stepping in.

The World Attained

By all of this I read Flesh as having a clear moral implication. If so much of our world is achievable without much thinking or conscious action, what does that say about the value of our world?

István gets to his position without friends of any sort, without any extended dialogue. He is addicted to cigarettes, then later adds alcoholism, while Helen’s son Thomas eventually ~~has~~ develops a heroin addiction. The only changes for István between rags and riches is the quantity and brand of what he’s smoking. At one point, after Iraq, in one of the novel’s most memorable moments, we learn about the development of his habit:

When he went to Iraq he smoked ten to twenty cigarettes a day.

Now it’s forty.

There is something gleeful about the narration here, a kind of revelling in self-destruction. It’s shocking to me because normally in our stories we expect our characters to be moderately rational, to want what’s best for them, to grow in positive directions. Instead, here, Szalay has István only get worse. And we could not expect for things to be otherwise, or hope for that, because István lacks the kind of interiority that might make such a thing possible. Yet in spite of that he still “grows” socially and financially, time and again.

The sex of the novel ranges from exploitative to hateful, and only rarely does it seem loving or a meeting of two minds and bodies in mutual recognition and respect. But that it happens over and over, especially within the contexts of infidelity, also becomes an argument of sorts. The world, as it comes to István at least, is full of unhappy people, trapped in unhappy situations. He can give them sex, but it is hard to say if he can achieve anything more. The material success of the Nymans has clearly not saved them, in any serious way, from the unhappiness that seems to afflict most of the characters of Flesh. The novel’s willingness to indicate a change in material conditions, especially through brand names for cars, watches, and cigarettes, is contrasted with this lack of any kind of change to the people consuming them – still sad, whether they know it or not.

We can also think about the dialogue again in connection with this world-critical angle. Taking a page at random, here’s a snatch of dialogue between Helen Nyman and her sister-in-law Mathilde, while Helen’s husband is in the hospital for cancer treatment:

“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes I’m okay.”

“You need to look after yourself.”

“I know.”

“You mustn’t let yourself go.”

“I know,” Helen says.

This dialogue is above all really strange. It is the right words, perhaps even the real words, but on the page it’s startling, as is all of the dialogue of Flesh. There is a distinct unliterariness to it – instead of flowing, the end of each line is like a cliff edge we must carefully lower ourselves down on to reach the beginning of the next. That awkwardness is the point, of course. Here are two people not really communicating to one another. They are, like the many-jobbed István, playing roles. They are also, deliberately, consciously, not connecting. The clipped speech makes it seem that they are all acutely, painfully conscious of the possibility of being hurt and choosing to give the slightest possible opening. Even if István’s own speech lacks this sense of self-protection, it certainly contains its sibling – the self-retention. “Okay” is one of the hardest replies to find an answer for, after all.

This dialogue relates the other topics, the sex and the material aspects of the world, by being another reminder of this world’s shallowness. Certainly these people could say more. They have, as the novel eventually reveals, more inside them. But the world as it comes to them, by and large, does not bring these things out. A bad world makes for bad dialogue, just as it makes for bad sex. Everyone here is trapped, without even the words to escape their cages.

The World Missing

f Flesh were merely a parabola of a man’s life, without growth or change, with merely an implied judgement on the world, it would probably still be reasonably good. However, what elevates the novel is the way that it also offers an answer, or at least a hint, of what is missing, and what it looks like. These missing things are threefold – love, imagination, and goodness.

Love is the first. Flesh is a book that is all about sex, but love is quite clearly absent, most of the time. This is further emphasised by the way that the majority of István’s sexual encounters, indeed his sexual relationships, are infidelities by the second person against their husbands. But from the beginning, with his relationship with the older woman, István is at least aware of love and its importance. He tells her he loves her and she tells him he does not know what that means. He protests that he does, but there is no evidence that this is the case. This show of emotion disturbs the woman and precipitates the end of their affair shortly thereafter.

Love does come back onto the page until István’s relationship with Helen, half way through the book. This time it is she who confesses her love to him. He does not know how to react, and she even forbids him a response. But she brings the idea of love back into the book, so that when István has a chance to show his affection, and what she means to him, following an accident, he does it. Even if that showing is still just a restrained, pained, retreat into alcoholism, it is a sign of real emotion, however poorly managed. If the novel begins with a statement without emotion, here there is emotion without its statement.

Imagination is important in the novel as something missing from the main world of the work. In contrast to the materiality of things – the brands, and so on, which suggest a kind of objectifying vision on the part of the characters – imagination, in the form of empathy, provides a counterpoint: a vision of a better way of thinking about other people. After István’s time in Iraq, carrying the weight of his friend’s death in combat, he keeps it to himself except when encouraged to share by therapy. He believes others could not understand. He himself cannot understand art, that legendary transferal medium for emotions, as his trip with Helen to a museum shows. And when the affair between her and him is discovered by Thomas, his response to her suggestion that he might tell his father is simply to say “I can’t imagine it.” At first glance István wholly lacks imagination, the ability to place himself in others’ shoes.

Again, however, the matter is only a question of seeming. In the background there is therapy, and hopefully independent personal growth. By the time István has a son of his own and has to confront the realities of the boy’s growing sexual maturity, he is able to reflect, looking back into himself at that age, to compare and contrast. It has taken a book, but this is still small progress. We can also see this progress formally. Not merely in the shockingly long paragraph (average length for any other book) of reflection after István discovers a well-thumbed porn mag, but more concretely in the way that the book begins by sticking closely to István, but then expands its reach to give glimpses into the lives of other characters too, such as Helen and Thomas. I would say this is a controversial decision on Szalay’s part in terms of focus, but insofar as it fits into a framework of the novel showing a growing awareness of other people, it makes sense.

Finally, the last thing obviously missing from the main world of the work is goodness, or positive action. Towards the book’s end, István is faced with that strangest of things to a man whose rise has been given mainly by chance – a choice. It is quite a plain one, between the full and permanent attainment of the earthly riches he has enjoyed for much of the book at the cost of a bad action, or rather continued inaction, versus a moral and “active” action which puts that attainment at risk. In this situation, István makes the latter decision. In terms of these two worlds, it means that he loses this great moneyed world and gains a smaller world, one of reflection and self-worth. He chooses, we might say, soul over mere flesh at last.

Conclusion

What is Flesh, in the end? A lot of things. I read it as showing our world as it is – atomised (István has no friends), materially obsessed, helpless – and showing another world, shining through the mist. Ultimately it is no mere dismissal of life. Its title might seem to set off a negative view of the body, but “Flesh” is not body. Rather, it is something less. It is only in combination with mind, and reflection, and thought, that flesh can be elevated into harmony, can become truly “body”.

What is interesting here is the tentativeness of the work’s conclusions on this front, which has allowed some critics to see it as specifically about masculinity. (Thomas calls István an example of “primitive masculinity”, which supports this). István’s progress, his discoveries, are limited: from nearly no self-consciousness or emotional expression to just a little. If we come to the book to learn, to grow ourselves, we probably could not – we are probably already far more emotionally mature than our hero. But all growth is valuable, is a story, and for the relative rarity of this kind of story, Flesh becomes all the more worth reading.

Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty

In the interests of full disclosure I must inform you I am compromised and perhaps, on this occasion, cannot discharge my reviewing duties as honourably as I normally would. Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful, delectable, novel, The Line of Beauty, concerns the life of a young man during the peak years of Thatcherite Britain. A period some ten years before I was even born, but one that chances of fate and birth mean I struggle to be wholly indifferent towards. I was not born a miner’s son, no. Quite the opposite – my grandfather was a very significant Conservative MP. I am tainted, I suppose, by this. By his ghostly shadow – he died when I was very small – and his books upon the wall, even as I write this now. Whether in action or reaction, this fact is a big annoying reality, one I try to avoid in life, yet ever fail to.

I know that readers here are scattered across the earth. It can be hard to understand the strength of the feelings that Margaret Thatcher earned for herself. When she died – which I do remember – it was startling to me to see so many people cursing the “witch” who now was gone. Yet many loved her, more quietly perhaps, and she repeatedly won large majorities in parliament. Whether one views her as an industry-destroying monster who robbed thousands of their jobs in the mines, or a hero for the aspiring who opened the way to middle-class property-ownership and general prosperity, her policies and personal values touched everyone in the United Kingdom, for better or worse. After a period of relative stagnation, Thatcher brought something new. The “Big Bang”, a sudden and large amount of financial deregulation in 1983, could describe the whole period – it was an explosion of change, with individuals free left to figure out the consequences and opportunities for themselves. Those who could, anyway.

Into this world steps the hero of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest. Young, fresh out of Oxford but not particularly rich or privileged, he embodies the upward social mobility of the times. A friendship of sorts with one Toby Fedden at Oxford gives him the chance to live with Toby’s family in London while he pursues further studies in Henry James and his style. The Feddens are a family with no need for social mobility. Gerald, the father, is a newly-minted MP in 1983, while his wife Rachel brings old money and further status to his affairs. Besides Toby, there’s also a daughter, Catherine, whose depressions are carefully hidden from the outside world.

Nick lives with the Feddens for the full four year period covered by The Line of Beauty, even as he finishes studies and begins work with another Oxonian friend, the Lebanese Wani Ouradi. The Ouradis, who have made their massive fortune in grocery stores, are another side of a changing Britain. The father is made a lord, the son is sent to Harrow. While the father may be spoken of, behind his back, in terms of racism and dismissal, the same cannot be said for the son. Wani, through his integration into the boarding school system, has already become more British – in a way – than Nick could ever hope to be.

Nick’s relationship with Wani continues his upward social climb by providing the financial support needed to solidify – at least, for a time – the social benefits conferred by his friendship with the Feddens. Wani’s wealth is so great that at one point he gives Nick five thousand pounds just so Nick stops asking him to pay him for smaller things. By the end of the novel, Wani has given Nick plenty more. The reason for such generosity is not merely that they are friends or that Wani is rich, but rather that Wani and Nick are sexual partners. For, complicating the linear progression of the novel, from rags to riches, namelessness to front-page news, is the simple fact that Nick is gay.

The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 legalised homosexual relations between consenting adults in the UK, but a law of the land is not a law of the mind, and Nick’s sexuality exists in an ambiguous field – tolerated, rather than quite accepted, by the novel’s characters. “They’re absolutely fine with it”, Nick says to his first boyfriend of the Feddens’ knowledge of his sexuality, then adds to himself – “as long as it’s never mentioned.” The tension is light enough that we may not notice it at first. Nick’s sexual self-discovery – for he was eventually “out” in Oxford, but remained a virgin nevertheless – seems to be linked with his other advances, all these positive things happening at once to him. In the first section of the novel, “The Love-Chord”, Nick’s romance with a young Black council worker is full of excitement and affection, as he’s initiated into the world of gay sex.

When we jump to 1986 for the novel’s main section, this innocent discovery and pleasure at the world is already gone. Leo, the council worker, has vanished – we do not learn why until much later – to be replaced by Wani. Suddenly, Nick is addicted to cocaine – the one drug whose identity is so tightly bound to money and (apparent) worldly success, and which he does together with Wani. The sex, loving with Leo, has become somewhat sordid. Wani is a risk-taker who enjoys picking people up for threesomes and is addicted to pornography. It’s hard not to read this, within the novel, as a kind of decay. Just as the sexual and physical pleasures reach their peaks, the moral content of Nick’s life is emptying out. He is no longer studying, the relationship with Wani is totally secret, and he seems utterly directionless even as his money and status grow.

Through Gerald Fedden, Hollinghurst develops the idea of contrast further. Gerald is driven to grow his own power through his politics and his money through business. He is on the up. Yet his love for the prime minister – who is a constant background presence in the novel but is never named – is a point of tension when the man has a wife to give his attention to. For their silver wedding anniversary, Gerald and Rachel have a party where Thatcher attends, and we see quite clearly how he struggles to balance his desire to impress both women. Nick later discovers that Gerald’s family man appearance is at least in part an act, when he finds him and his secretary in a compromising position behind the scenes at a campaign event.

The difference between illusion and reality is one of the clearest thematic oppositions of the novel. As in our own world, people live within one of their own imagining. Gerald has an admirer on his street called Geoffrey, who is convinced of Gerald’s merits until the crisis of the novel’s final section forces him to understand otherwise. The Ouradis believe, or wish to, that their son is not gay, and pay a young lady to pretend to be his girlfriend, and then fiancée, to maintain the illusion. The drugs consumed by the wealthy characters are also tools for the creation of another picture of reality, as the text shows by drawing repeated attention to the performance of Nick and Wani socially before and after they have visited the bathroom for a quick hit of cocaine. Being trapped within illusions is not, either, the sole prerogative of the rich. Leo brings Nick home to meet his mother, who staunchly refuses to believe that her son could be gay or that Nick could be anything other than a mere friend.

Illusions can remain solid, or become fragile and break. Rather than the sudden collapses at the novel’s end, the more interesting illusions are those that are slowly undermined as the novel progresses. We follow Nick throughout The Line of Beauty. It is his novel, his consciousness that we watch, his prejudices we live. His relationship with Leo, the council worker, is interesting in this regard for revealing the negative impacts upon the people he works with of Thatcher’s policies. Nick, however, chooses to ignore them, just as the Feddens choose to ignore the negative reputation of Gerald’s business partner until he has already been fleeced by him, and as the Conservative party chooses to ignore the Ouradis’ class and ethnic background while they can accept significant donations from them. We have a sense that while things are good, boundaries and identities can shift and be safely blurred. Unfortunately, as in life, the music soon stops.

The moral decay of the upper classes, drugs and sex and power in all their attraction and distraction and destruction – these are time-honoured things. Indeed, coinciding with my reading of The Line of Beauty I also plunged into the show Succession, about the succession crisis for the aging patriarch of a large US media conglomerate. Excellent also, the merging of themes in both works (illusion, drugs, lies) did make me uneasy as to why one might choose the novel over the show, besides the period colour of the Thatcher years and the prominence of gay sex in the book. Even the period of Succession’s filming (starting in 2018) has coincided with particularly poor moral performance of the United States, at least when viewed from across the pond, as the Thatcher years may be viewed today.

The answer has to be Hollinghurst’s language, and the filtering effect of Nick’s consciousness. Language is important here – Nick aims to become an expert on Henry James’s use of the stuff, after all. All of those classic tropes of fiction written in the shadow of class consciousness are here. Of Rachel Fedden we hear how Nick “loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement.” When we read the dialogue of the novel we must be willing, as we might with a novel of the 19^th century, to read the language as a dance of concealment and revelation, as when Catherine Fedden has a breakdown which must be suppressed by the language of the guests at a dinner: “an emotional young lady” says one, “a very emotional young lady” says another – empty phrases preferable to acknowledging an unpleasant fact.

The language of something like Succession is masterful, but in that case it is a mastery of swearing and comic insults rather than subtlety. One might be tempted to say this is a difference of temperament between American and British national characters, but it’s fairer, I think, to note the differences of the media. In television we have too much to work with – acting, backgrounds, music, action – so that language can be lost or become of secondary importance. The limitations of prose also serve to focus attention upon what it can do well, and the deliberateness of each choice of word and phrase. Prose also goes at our own pace, whereas television is propelled onwards unless we reach for the pause button – for this reason too, it seems to ask for a holistic appraisal, rather than close reading. Or close watching, I suppose.

Prose also allows for the theme of illusion to work better than it perhaps would in film or television. Nick’s illusions become our illusions, his evasions become our small opportunities to see what he refuses to notice. We see the Thatcherite years both as a bounteous becoming in the first part, then as a desperate attempt to enjoy things in the second part, before finally witnessing their collapse in the third part. Yet at the same time we can see the direction of travel, even as Nick avoids it: the presence of AIDs long before it is named, the prejudices against gays and foreigners that are neatly ignored so long as the money flows, the sense that not everyone is benefitting from the Conservative government.

This might just be so much guff from me, as usual. Especially as it only took two years from publication before there was a television adaptation of The Line of Beauty. Clearly the prose could live just as easily as spoken words, after all! It’s a good novel, well-made and well-written. To a certain extent, as an assassination of Britain’s ruling elite, it reminded me of the Patrick Melrose novels. But where Edward St Aubyn’s novels each take place over a continuous time period (with one exception), The Line of Beauty is more comfortable varying its scenes. This, to me, makes it seem technically more accomplished. I also amassed a staggering number of new words in the back of my copy, so clearly Hollinghurst has done a good job eating the dictionary.

I think what makes the novel worth reading is the way it manages to portray a very historically contested period without seeming overly partisan. Naturally, the rich are rude, prejudiced toffs, but that’s hardly news – indeed, I don’t think they would find that surprising either. They, (we?), would probably laugh at the accusation. Rather than focusing on either the suffering caused by Thatcher’s policies, or solely on the glamour, the novel shows it as a time of possibilities, good and bad. “I was lucky. And then I was… careful” – so speaks Nick of how he avoided contracting HIV. Just the same can be said of his experience of 1983-1987. Luck means that he comes out of the final pages rich in spite of his relatively lowly origins, with valuable knowledge gained at a painful price, but not one too hard to bear.

Yet we know that it could have been otherwise, that things are fragile. This is a valuable lesson, in our own turbulent times, as well.

Making a Mystery – Conrad’s Lord Jim

Lord Jim is the novel where Joseph Conrad’s ingenuity of construction and technique come together most spectacularly in service of creating an atmosphere of mystery. A simple work in story, it tells the tale of a man who, having once lost his honour, cannot live down this fact, and instead chooses always and ever to flee it. Upon this simple foundation Conrad builds a formidable sense of psychological depth for its main character with his prose, so that even as the story becomes no more complex than this, its main character himself never quite comes to bore us.

At the same time, to me the novel is also one of Conrad’s clearest failures. Having created a masterful atmosphere, a wondrous fog of mystery, Conrad shines a torch on it in the later sections of the work and devalues much of the power of the world he had made. Be that as it may, the creation is what is interesting, and it is this that I propose to discuss here today.

A Body as much as a Mind

“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.”

What an opening! We must really imagine this for a moment. Out of the void of the first page we suddenly have a figure coming straight for us – you want to leap out of the way before it’s too late, like those people encountering the first moving pictures of oncoming trains. With Jim like a “bull” we have a sense of latent violence, of danger. But then “dogged” comes along and contains this opposite: we think of a much smaller animal, so that this initial violence is immediately tempered by uncertainty – is there “nothing aggressive” in it after all? Such initial ambiguities are only heightened by words like “seemed”, “apparently.” Here we have all that we will come to recognise as Jim – an impression and an uncertainty, mixing together. Yet before all this, we have a body. For it is as a body that Conrad creates Jim as a real figure. We see him, from the first sentence, as a physical thing – we know how he walks, where he has been, how he is dressed.

Without such solidity of body, speculating on a personality feels like cheating – it’s as dull as a friend gossiping about someone you do not know. Throughout Lord Jim, Jim himself is a bodily presence just as his mind is an absence. Apart from the first twenty-or-so pages, the novel is narrated by the sailor and gentleman Charles Marlow, whom we might know as the narrator of Heart of Darkness (among other stories). This adds a powerful limitation to the narrative’s range by keeping us behind his eyes, within his knowledge, until this finally becomes stretched unfairly near the end of the work. While Marlow thinks he knows Jim’s heart, he certainly knows him as a presence: “A feeble burst of many voices mingled with the tinkle of silver and glass floated up from the dining-room below; through the open door the outer edge of the light from my candle fell on his back faintly; beyond all was black; he stood on the brink of a vast obscurity, like a lonely figure by the shore of a sombre and hopeless ocean.”

We see Jim here, as a body in the world. Marlow has to see him thus, or he would have nobody to talk about. But we see his back – the physical representation of the distance between his heart and ourselves. At the final time Marlow sees him, we also see Jim as a body without seeing inside him: “The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. . . .” As descriptions, they do a thing that is by no means easy – they frustrate our desire for complete knowledge without being unfair. They say that just as with a real person, we can know Jim as a presence without fully knowing him as a spirit. They force upon us the duty of interpretation – we must try to piece together the scraps of a soul to match this bodily outline.

Interpreting a limited material

This disjunction between revealed body and hidden mind is certainly one way Lord Jim creates its mystery and encourages interpreting it. Another is that it foregrounds interpreting as a general condition of life almost from the very start, through Jim’s time in court. Jim’s great crime, his original sin, is to have been first mate on the “Patna” and to have acted in dereliction of his duty: he abandons its passengers, pilgrims heading to Mecca, together with a few other members of the Patna’s crew, after the ship appears to have sustained critical damage while at sea. “I had jumped… it seems.” Our first view of him through Marlow’s eyes is when he is already in the dock being tried. Jim is trying to “tell honestly the truth of his experience”, while the court is after facts. But the narrator despairs: “as if facts could explain anything!” The contrast of the bureaucratic, fact-finding, courtroom language with the complex descriptions and uncertainties of Jim’s experience is the first clue that interpretation is central to the novel.

Or perhaps not, because Jim himself is an inveterate interpreter too: “He loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality.” He is, as another character remarks, a “Romantic.” Unlike the other characters, there’s evidence that Jim engages in that most dangerous of occupations – reading. It is for this reason that there’s such a gap between his idea of himself and the cowardly (or human) reality that he demonstrates when tested in the Patna case. It is Jim’s horror at his own self that leads him to constantly flee the positions that Marlow arranges for him in various places around South East Asia, before finally ending up in the remote village of Patusan, far away from anyone who might know his shame at his one staining moment of weakness.

The court interprets in search of facts, Jim interprets in search of heroism, but Marlow does his own interpreting too. Marlow sits and tells a story after dinner. It is dark, but the other figures create the sense of a community, a class, of which Marlow is both merely a representative and a critical voice. Marlow’s interest in Jim comes from his recognition of Jim as also “one of us” – a phrase repeated, over and over, in the novel. “Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse.” Jim is a gentleman, well-bred, well-spoken, and in a trust-based world like that of shipping, he has not only disappointed himself, he has also shamed his people – Marlow included.

The sense that Jim’s crime is touches all within this group is emphasised by the way that Marlow lets others speak of it and share their own view of it. There’s a Captain Brierly, whose passages in chapter VI are a perfect story in themselves. This man, who has the proven heroism of having saved lives at sea to his name, is part of the three men judging Jim’s case. “Why are we tormenting that young chap?” He asks Marlow between sessions. Jim’s guilt so challenges his world that Brierly jumps overboard a few weeks after the trial is concluded. There is also a Frenchman that Marlow meets in Sydney, who was crew of a gunboat that discovered the Patna, floating aimlessly with its white crew absconded. Hence the story that Jim tells is added to, changed, challenged, by the others that Marlow encounters.

The most interesting, from the perspective of the narrative, is the character of Chester, a West Australian who plans a scheme for extracting a significant amount of guano in a dangerous region of the ocean. He correctly identifies Jim as someone down on his luck who may see the offer of a risky and remunerative trip to the to a guano island as a way out, and tries to persuade Marlow over to his view. It does not work – Marlow has taken it upon himself to sort Jim’s destiny out, perhaps in the hope of saving his whole people the shame. Angry, Chester retorts: “Oh! You are devilish smart… but you are like the rest of them. Too much in the clouds. See what you will do with him.”

Two things are interesting in this moment. The first is that it is an attack on our narrator. Marlow is an active participant in Lord Jim, not a passive spinner of yarns. He catches Jim immediately after the trial, helps him get jobs across South East Asia. We expect him to be benevolent, and he is not maliciously “unreliable” in the way that some narrators are. We might recognise that his own interest is driven by a murky set of elements, including his desire that Jim not let “us” down, but we largely trust him. By having Marlow be challenged so directly, readers now also have to judge him not just as a narrator, but as an actor too. In other words, through challenging Marlow, Conrad makes it clear to readers that they should be engaging in judging him too. We must interpret our interpreter.

The second interesting thing here is that it is a clear example of a branching path in the story. Conrad is a writer we generally associate with a deterministic view of life, of dark fates leading to inevitable demises. Marlow’s judgement of Chester is correct – the expedition to the guano island most likely leads to the deaths of everyone involved following the passage through the region of a hurricane – but that means it is fatal, but not fatalistic. For once Conrad seems to be suggesting there was another option for his story. That every moment contains a choice is a truism. That Jim made the choice to jump and that this has cursed his life is a central fact of Lord Jim. But what Jim does afterwards is up to him, though his character naturally plays a significant role in determining what he does.

We cannot choose without a sense of options, and here we have an option provided directly – Jim could follow Marlow’s advice, or he could follow Chester’s idea. The story could be otherwise – it is open. By doing this, perhaps unintentionally, Conrad is furthering the idea of being critical towards Marlow. If Marlow were merely good or bad we might give him no further thought, but if there’s an alternative offered, readers can actively consider which one is best. It is another impulse towards involvement, created through Conrad’s technique.

Further makers of mystery

I have read almost everything in Conrad’s major works now, have read his letters, have re-read much, including Lord Jim itself. Some aspects of his style are now more transparent to me than they would be to someone encountering him for the first time. He is extremely reliant on tripartite descriptions, on weighing down nouns with barnacle-like adjectives, on abusing the thesaurus for synonyms for “unclear”. He brings in a view of a fallen world not subtly, but through countless references to devilry, the infernal, and downward movement. In the same way he suggests a rigidity of destiny through his regular references to fate. His primary sources of reference are biblical. At least some of the turgidity of his prose comes from the heaviness of the adjectives and the occasional bad English (words or phrases directly translated French or Polish). When read with the right frame of mind, however, all these features of his language become another source of atmospheric murk and hence of mystery.

Just as Conrad’s prose makes the mystery, so too does his use of languages. The Frenchman mentioned earlier speaks partly in French, just as the central figure among Marlow’s advisors, Stein, speaks in an English brutalised into something half-German: “It is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. Ja!” His advice for Jim: “In the destructive element immerse… that was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream…” The idea of this blog post has been that Conrad builds a mystery in the novel by showering us in interpretations and forcing interpretation upon us. Such phrases as these from Stein, comprehensible yet not quite clear, serve this purpose also. They are not only memorable for their unique phrasing, they are also just vague enough to force us into reflection. What exactly does this mean?

The actual language of the novel, the light and dark, the fog, all of the adjectives, is perhaps less interesting once you have read enough of it. It creates a mood of mystery, rather than being itself mysterious. “The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog.” Like the images of Jim with his back turned, or pacing, or whatever, they tell us we cannot know him – but we, stubborn, if we are in a good mood and are willing to give the story its due, try regardless.

Conclusion

The story its due… Well, Jim’s first half is up there with Heart of Darkness, and indeed the two works were written near-simultaneously, but as soon as the action moves to Patusan and Jim becomes a kind of ruler there, everything falls apart in my eyes. (And in that of many critics.) Conrad’s characterisation of the native population is less well done than of the Europeans, Marlow’s narration becomes more reliant on what he has not witnessed, which simplifies the interpretative layering, and an external figure is introduced to resolve Jim’s ambiguities by bringing the story to a violent and silly, however real the sources are, conclusion.

On the final page Marlow asks: “Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder?” But this would be just as appropriate a remark to be made as Marlow retreats from Patusan after his one and only visit, watching Jim shrinking by the shore… some hundred pages before the novel actually ends. To me, Lord Jim is not a “Romance”. It is a mystery of a single man’s soul. Therefore, what deepens that mystery improves the book, while what takes it away diminishes it. The last third of the novel is therefore its unravelling and could be removed without harm.

Still, the ravelling is brilliant. When Lord Jim is at its best every word, every sentence, serves to create a sense of depth and mystery around its central character. It’s humbling, and shocking, how simple the story actually is. A man jumps from a boat, mistakenly thinking it is sinking. He is tried and banned from working as a sailor again. A fellow gentleman aids him in finding new work, which he flees each time his past is remembered. Eventually he ends up on an island where nobody knows his past, and he gets the chance to recreate himself. This works, for a time, until a figure from the outside world comes to break the illusion.

It’s a story we could tell in thirty pages, not three hundred. Even psychologically, Jim is not that complicated. But we see him as from a chair in a dark room, with his back to us as he stares into a moonlit night, and Conrad creates thereby something more than a man – a symbol, a mystery, a ghost to haunt us. Regardless of whether we ultimately like the work, in terms of the writing there is so much deserving of wonder.