Category: British and Irish Literature

Progress and my Discontent – Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

The trouble with going to a university like Cambridge is that I could review the Irish author Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends entirely through anecdotes and references to my own friends and acquaintances. Because if there is one thing this book does well above all else it is (re)create a certain type of person, one dominating English faculties the world over. It is funny that this even extends to the cover of my edition of the book. The two girls there look remarkably like an ex-friend of mine, and if you’re anyway connected to that world, you’ll recognize the hair and dress sense too.

A cover of Conversations with Friends shows a drawing of two women
The cover of my edition of Conversations with Friends shows two girls who look weirdly like a girl I was once friends with… It is a girl who populates humanities faculties the world over.

But anecdotes, probably, will not do. Rooney and her work are being praised the world over, a tv-series is in the works, and she’s not even thirty. The question, then, is whether this book is actually any good. At the end of the day, anybody can tape our banal dinnertime conversations, can write down a list of topics that come up again and again. To make a good book it isn’t enough just to capture reality; that reality needs to be transformed such as to give it greater significance. Given the context, it is a balancing act for Rooney. First, she has to show us that our conversations aren’t as significant as we thought, but then that our lives are significant precisely where we don’t expect it. That’s how the material can become truly transformative.

The Plot of Conversations with Friends

Frances is a twenty-one-year-old student in Dublin who wants to write. She’s rather cold and doesn’t have a huge number of friends. Her best friend is Bobbi, who is cool. Bobbi and Frances together perform in poetry readings. At one of these poetry readings they meet Melissa, a well-known journalist, who decides to write about them. At this point the two young women are taken into Melissa’s world, one from a higher class than what Frances is used to. At a party Frances gets to know Nick, Melissa’s husband, and they start sleeping together. But sleeping with someone, especially someone who is married, isn’t always a painless operation. This new relationship ends up straining Frances’ relationship with those around her and revealing an awful lot about herself that she perhaps didn’t want to know.

Thematically, Conversations with Friends does a lot of things. One of the main conflicts is between youthful idealism and aged experience. Melissa and Nick are a lot older than Frances and Bobbi, and their views consequently differ a lot. It’s one thing to talk about destroying capitalism; quite another to, when faced with the richness of its blessings, reject it once again. In the same way, an adulterous relationship is hardly the ideal sort of relationship for plenty of reasons, and Frances needs to move away from an intellectual view of the world to have any chance of enjoying it. Purity localised within yourself might work, but demanding the world be equally perfect is a recipe for disaster.

Form and Structure

Conversations with Friends reminds me, to a large extent, of Brett Easton Ellis’s debut novel, Less than Zero. Both of them take a youthful cast of characters and reveal the fault lines within their world. Both of them also share a similar pared-down style that lacks direct relation of the characters’ emotions. Conversations with Friends uses first-person narration, but Frances hides her personal views from the reader just as much as she does from herself, so that the narration feels strangely empty. There is also no use of speech marks. It is easy enough to tell who is talking and when, but it gives the effect of isolating Frances. It feels like we are only inside her mind, and that connections with other people are fleeting. I like it; it suits the idea of the novel. We may talk and talk yet never reach each other’s hearts.

Culture and Politics

A bit like Less than Zero, Conversations with Friends is full of those little cultural markers which, like spices, give their representation of reality its relevance and accuracy. Films, books, television series, and even games are all named in logical places. Rooney wants to show the kind of shared cultural milieu that her characters inhabit, and she succeeds. But the naming doesn’t just extend to cultural artefacts – the politics of Conversations with Friends is also decidedly locked into its time. News of Syria, police brutality, and so on all tie the work into the late 2010s. The characters are all politically radical, as we humanities students often are. Communism, anarchism, Gilles Deleuze, modern feminism – a common frame of political reference is established early on.

Mark Fisher, whose work I’ve written on here, certainly seems relevant in the context of the characters’ depressions and despairs under late capitalism. While I read, I also thought a lot about David Foster Wallace’s essay on Dostoevsky, where he talks about the kind of literature we need to write to be able to move on from the pervasive ironic unseriousness of the present day. Rooney doesn’t really move beyond this irony, but instead of attacking the systematic problems and inequalities in the modern state her targets seem to be the very people who think they are most against the state. I mean, it’s in the title – conversations dominate. And conversations achieve very little in this book. The characters, concerned as they are with everything that is wrong with the world, don’t seem interested in doing anything about it.

What really matters

In the end Conversations with Friends is about conversations with friends, and the friends and time the characters spend with them become far more important than their political views. It is not that politics divides us – the characters in the book are all on the same page – but rather that politics doesn’t bring the characters together. But speaking, revealing the truth of one’s heart – this does have the capacity to create a lasting and valuable relationship between people. Ultimately, the contents of the relationships prove less important than the relationships themselves. Frances goes from a position of apparently great academic knowledge but limited self-knowledge to almost the exact opposite, and she’s all the happier for it.

What I liked about Conversations with Friends

I ended up liking quite a few things about Conversations with Friends. For one, the book not only accurately portrays its chosen milieu, it also successfully satirises it. The book is, I mean, quite funny. “I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband”. Frances’s deadpan style makes humour easy. The humour is biting and modern, and indeed another thing I liked about the book was that it really felt it was written in this century. Rooney successfully incorporates instant messaging, emails, and games in a way that is natural, instead of pretending they don’t exist.

I also liked the way that the people were also modern. Their concerns were relevant, their attitudes – this kind of particular middle-class guilt – are attitudes that really haven’t existed for very long. Rooney gives voice not to a people who have been traditionally voiceless, but to part of a new generation that hasn’t yet been given voice. In this sense, the book is pretty unique for the moment. Even the older characters were well done. I felt Frances’s fear when she went home to her alcoholic father’s house, and recognised my own father in the language of Frances’s.

The way that Rooney emphasises the importance of human connections and relationships is also something I liked. It’s not an original message, but it’s one we all need to hear. The incorporation of a little spiritual subplot wasn’t half-bad either, though Frances’ modern sensibility prevents this from going very far. As is, I suppose, reasonable enough. The book, for all its dryness – Conversations with Friends definitely came from under Raymond Carver’s Overcoat, so to speak – also has a few moments of surprising beauty, like this one: “Buses ran past like boxes of light, carrying faces in the windows”. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the world in front of us is capable of that.

What I didn’t like

“you have to do more than say you’re anti things” – Bobbi. Rooney is a self-professed Marxist, and Conversations with Friends does well in showing the complicated structures that reinforce unequal hierarchies, oppress certain groups, and all of that stuff. Frances claims she doesn’t want to work, but through connections ends up making quite a bit of money on a writing project. Everything works out in the end, but only because she is already, comparatively, well-placed within the late stage capital environment of modern Ireland as a middle-class white woman.

A photo of Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney was born in 1991, so unlike the people I’m usually reading she’s neither dead nor old. But she’s pretty cool! Photo by Alberto Cristofari—Contrasto/Redux via TIME

But though I appreciated the politics of Conversations with Friends, I felt the ultimate message was somewhat off. Rooney has written that she doesn’t know how to incorporate her politics into her work, and I completely understand the difficulty. But to reject politics in favour of the present moment and relationships (as the book’s conclusion seems to suggest) feels a lot like rejecting political action altogether. Talk accomplishes nothing, and since nobody seems serious about acting the overall feeling is that we may as well ignore the glaring problems we’re facing and hope they’ll just go away. I don’t really like the pessimism of this undertone; it sits uneasily with me.

Conclusion

I think I must have liked Conversations with Friends, though, in the end. After all, it’s a debut novel. It’s funny, at times even beautiful, and it hits close to home. The challenge of conveying radical politics within a novel while still making the novel compelling is a great one, and Rooney’s in no way to blame for not entirely succeeding. In fact, I’m glad that she at the very least reveals the degree of hypocrisy that underlines a lot of our virtue signalling these days. The value of our friendships and relationships transcends the political interests of the present moment, and hopefully always will. But we shouldn’t give up on change altogether. There is a compromise out there. The challenge of the great novels to come is finding it.

I’m looking forward to reading Normal People soon.

Update: I read it!

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day – A Review

My friend James almost always brings up The Remains of the Day when we talk about literature. He’s a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro and rather thought the book would be my cup of tea. Well, at long last I’ve read the book and I have to admit that he was right. The Remains of the Day is a fascinating and sad story about the passage of time, and what we can salvage from the end of our lives, when it might seem that so much has passed us by. At my advanced age of twenty-two, it seems perfectly suited for me.

A photo of Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017
Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most celebrated authors writing in the UK now, and The Remains of the Day is probably his most famous work. He won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Photo by Frankie Fouganthin (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It tells the story of the life of a butler, Mr Stevens, who works in a great English country house, Darlington Hall, and the challenges he faces when he comes to look back on his past in his twilight years. For me the book is particularly poignant because of my own experience of the topics dealt within it, as my grandmother lives in a castle that is still served by staff (though they don’t live on site). Although it was published in 1989 and the action takes place in 1956, the questions and concerns of The Remains of the Day all remain vital and interesting now, and stretch far beyond the secret world of British upper classes it takes as its setting.

The Story

Mr Stevens, the aging butler of Darlington Hall, is presented with his greatest challenge yet when his new American employer suggests he goes for a car ride to get himself out of the house. The American is returning for a few weeks to his homeland and thinks that Stevens could use the fresh air. Stevens himself is not altogether for the idea, but he manages to convince himself. He has begun to notice certain mistakes in the running of the household, which he attributes to a lack of staff employed since Lord Darlington, the original owner, left. The trip can therefore be justified as a business one, for Stevens has recently received a letter from a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and he decides to end his trip with a visit to her home, hoping she will rejoin the household.

Though Stevens travels around the countryside, most of The Remains of the Day comes as memories Stevens reconsiders with age. The central tension in Remains of the Day becomes the one between what Stevens is willing to admit to himself, and what out of fear, or cowardice, or pride, he does not accept. The decline and death of his own father, the rise of fascism, and Stevens’ relations with Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington are all replayed to the reader, but only by looking at what is not said can we appreciate their significance.

The Style and Form of The Remains of the Day

The first-person narration of The Remains of the Day is deceptively simple. It certainly is deceptive. Stevens has been plucked perfectly from his upper-class milieu, and like the English upper-class, he rarely says what he means. It is only thanks to the vividness of his memories, in particular through remembered dialogue, that we come to see what is really going on in the past and in the present. To take one example, when Stevens finds that his father has died, he decides to continue working at an important international conference instead of taking a break. In the narration there is no hint that Stevens is suffering. The recollection is explained by Stevens as the apotheosis of his career as a butler, his ultimate mastery of dignity. But then we reach the dialogue of his waiting, and his desired impression comes under attack.

“Stevens, are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. Perfectly.”

“You look as though you’re crying.” I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face.

“I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.”

Without narration to interrupt and reinterpret this exchange, we are presented with a direct glimpse of Stevens’ pain. But when the chapter ends he tries once more to control our interpretation of the recollection. “For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.” Language is a tool for the expression of our selves, for communication. But it can just as easily be used for creating a false picture of the world. Stevens, as if to save himself from the truth of that day, from the rejection of his father on his death bed, uses language to justify his cold-heartedness, to turn defeat into a kind of triumph. “You see, I know my father would have wishes me to carry on just now.” He says. But we aren’t so easily fooled.

Love and Deceit

The language of The Remains of the Day, instead of revealing, conceals the true nature of what has passed. Through verbiage and excessive reasoning Stevens tries to fool himself and the reader. Miss Kenton and her attempts to flirt with Stevens are concealed in the narration by Stevens’ refusal to ascribe any kind of romantic meaning to them. They appear only as words, and we need to divine their hidden depths for ourselves. Likewise, Stevens structures his trip to Miss Kenton – he initially “forgets” that she’s married and now Mrs Benn – as a business trip. But to the reader it’s clear enough that there is a romantic interest involved too.

We would be forgiven for thinking that Stevens does not realise what he is doing, that he is deceiving himself. The truth is much more sad. As the book draws to a close we find Stevens, at the end of the day, sitting by the beach. As he talks with a stranger it becomes clear that he knows that his life has been filled with mistakes, and that he’s trying desperately to find something good in all of them. The ending at least gives us a glimmer of hope, that though Stevens is old, still he might yet change, and find joy in what remains to him, and what has passed him by.

A photo of an English country house, located in front of a pond
An English country house, of the sort that Mr Stevens spends his life in. But is there something missing in that world and that life? photo by Ronald Searle (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Butler and the Stiff Upper Lip

We English tend not to talk about our feelings, not even among friends. Stevens, one can tell, has never confided a thing to anybody. But though he has survived, The Remains of the Day raises the question of how far our English taciturnity is cause for celebration. Stevens is preoccupied with the question of “what is a great butler”, a question he explores with almost academic rigour. A large part of it is the stiff upper lip, what Stevens terms dignity. It is the decision never to let one’s feelings either show or affect one’s work. Stevens, in his own description of himself, asks the reader to consider whether he himself might be such a butler. For anybody who has been reading, his loyalty to Lord Darlington and his dignity in the face of his father’s death, are all compelling evidence of his “greatness”.

But Stevens never asks us at what cost this greatness has been attained. The Remains of the Day doesn’t just undermine Stevens’ narrative, it also challenges the very values he holds dear. What we see, even if he doesn’t, is that being a great butler attacks Stevens’ own humanity. The coldness, the dedication to one’s craft that Stevens practices, dehumanises him. He is unable to “banter”, to engage in the world and form non-professional relationships with other people. He suffers especially harshly at the hands of his new American employer, Mr Farraday, for whom bantering is second nature.

But Stevens also doesn’t appreciate beauty either. Although he claims to live in one of the most magical places in England, he rarely shows it. Whether the portraits on the wall or silver on the table, the beauty in objects simply becomes part of Stevens’ job – he must keep things clean and shiny. It is only extremely infrequently, and often in the company of Miss Kenton, that Stevens’ narration is forced, for a moment, to acknowledge the beauty of the sun setting or the grounds of the manor house. Stevens is a great butler, but for all that he’s lost his friends, he’s failed to find love, and he cannot even appreciate the beauty that lies in front of him. Truth be told, the cost of his excellence seems far too high.

The Glory of the Past

The common note in The Remains of the Day, even before Stevens’ personal failures are explored, is melancholy and decline. It is the gentle melancholy of Chekhov, seeing the world fall apart but not wishing to intervene. In Ishiguro’s novel this decline is primarily a decline of the worldview and corresponding world of the British upper class. We see this immediately at the novel’s beginning. Stevens has remained in the employ of the owners of Darlington Hall, but the Darlingtons are nowhere to be seen. Instead, an outsider – and American – has arrived, and most of the original staff have left. Americans in The Remains of the Day represent the future. Lord Darlington, dismayed by the cruel treatment of Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, hopes to change the treaty’s contents.

To this end, Darlington eventually organises a conference with major figures from all across Europe. The goal is to pressure their respective governments to ease the reparations demanded of Germany. It is a noble goal, motivated by honour and respect for the First World War’s defeated countries. However, it is a goal from a bygone age. An American in attendance stands and gives a speech where he attacks all of the Europeans for their foolish idealism, for their useless values and amateurism. What they need to succeed is cunning and professionalism. He is booed out of the conference. But Hitler succeeds precisely because he knew how to manipulate this idealism, how to appeal to the values of the British classes when encouraging appeasement. In the end, of course, the American is proved right.

The glorious past that Stevens loves is revealed, over the course of The Remains of the Day, to be ultimately an illusion. Darlington, with his conference a failure, dabbles in fascism and dies a disgrace. Antisemitism leads to the unfair dismissal of two maids, and Stevens – ever the professional – refuses even to comfort them as he removes them from their positions. Stevens is also a terrible elitist and snob without ever, really, justifying these views. As easy as it is to begin The Remains of the Day with a sense of nostalgia, it’s equally hard not to end the book with a feeling of disappointment in the world that lies behind us. Of course, there was a lot to value in some of the old British values – but there was far more that really isn’t worth our time.

Conclusion

It was interesting as I read The Remains of the Day to see how my attitude to Stevens himself changed. At first I thought of him as something of a buffoon. But then as time went on that bemusement morphed into sadness, disappointment, and finally a kind of anger. I was angry that Stevens was so obsessed about being a great butler that he came to neglect everything else in the world. I was angry that he spends the entire book lying to himself. It’s only at the very end that there’s a brief hint that all that might change. But I was glad of it, just as I was glad for Stevens. In truth, I pitied him.

the original cover of The Remains of the Day, showing a pocket watch on a black background
The book’s original cover.

The Remains of the Day is a lovely book. Its story of decline hidden under the façade of class glory rings true with my own experience of the declining position of old elites. It is wonderfully written – it is not beautiful, but it is the perfect blend of form and content. Stevens feels incredibly real, and his self-delusion seems strikingly real too. There are many of us who go through life trying to tell ourselves that our own course is the right one. But sooner or later the time comes when we must face the truth of our error. Even if we are already in the remains of our own days upon this earth, there is still great value in taking the step towards self-knowledge. In that sense, for all its melancholy, the message of The Remains of the Day remains an uplifting one. Check it out.

For more delicate treatment of the past, consider Salvatore Satta’s tale of the coming of modernity in Sardinia, The Day of Judgement, reviewed here; and also Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, presenting in an interview format the collapse of the Soviet Union from those who experienced it, reviewed here.

Myth and the Creation of Character in Conrad’s Nostromo

I’ve just finished Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a magnificent and great novel if ever there was one. It chronicles several years in the history of the invented Republic of Costaguana in South America, focusing on the seaboard town known as Sulaco as it grows rich and influential thanks to a huge silver mine located there. This mine is the central image of the story, consuming the hearts and minds of every character by offering power and wealth in equal measure and giving the novel many elements taken from traditional myths. What Nostromo does so well is use this mine to become at turns a political novel, a philosophical one, and – most importantly – an adventure one. Using formal inventiveness Conrad is able to create a fictional world every bit as alluring as the silver at its heart.

A photo of Joseph Conrad, author of Nostromo
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), whose Heart of Darkness has been the bane of many schoolchildren, including me. I’m glad I gave him a second chance, because he has fast become one of my favourites.

Here, though, I’d like to gush simply about the formal tricks and turns Conrad uses to introduce and give life to his imagined republic, and to the characters who inhabit it, especially the mysterious and fascinating Nostromo himself. The novel is good enough that I could go on for days, and so I think it’s wise I limit myself to these two connected ideas.

An Introduction to Sulaco: The First Chapter of Nostromo

The first chapter of Nostromo is not, dare I say, particularly punchy. It begins in the matter of fact manner more typical of a history book than of a novel. But therein lies its purpose. It is designed to bring us into the Republic of Costaguana and Sulaco as if they had existed for many years. And this requires a great deal of skill. When we think of a country, we rarely stop there in our minds. We think of the capital, we think of the location, we think of its history and its people. Conrad, in creating a new world, has to do all this in a way that doesn’t come across as being boring; but he also cannot skimp on the descriptions, because then the world will hardly feel real and lived-in then. That is the central challenge for the first chapter and its four or five pages.

“In the time of Spanish rule” – the novel’s opening words – already establish Nostromo as part of history, and a familiar one. We laypeople may not know the specifics of Spanish rule, but we know its approximate time and its approximate extent. It doesn’t seem too unreasonable to add another country to those we know Spain once ruled.

Once the country has been fixed in history it needs to be fixed geographically through a description of the main features around Sulaco itself. But naming a mere rock, such like the peninsula of Azuera, is once again not enough. Conrad must invest objects with history too, and show their relationship to the people. And thus, the barren peninsula, we are told, is associated by the poor of the town with “an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth” and therefore they “will tell you that it is deadly because of its hidden treasures”. Now we have not merely a rock, but a people revealed through their attitude towards it.

Conrad goes on, very briefly, to tell the story of this peninsula – which is never visited during the events of Nostromo. That is, how two foreigners went out with the goal of finding the treasure apparently lurking there but disappeared without a trace. Again, we have the people’s view of things – “the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success”. Magic and mystery live within the language of this part of the novel, and these stories-within-the-story of Nostromo add to the fairy-tale like quality of the novel. Ideas and events seem doomed to repeat. Perhaps, indeed, they are fated to.

A photo of Panama, showing trees and a peninsula
A view of Panama, whose scenery is similar to that of the Republic of Costaguana in Nostromo. Picture from Erandly [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

The rest of the first chapter continues to add to this mythic representation of Sulaco and its history. A rogue cloud is described as “burst[ing] suddenly into flame and crash[ing] like a sinister pirate-ship of the air” – an ominous description if ever there was one. Meanwhile, using phrases like “as the saying is”, Conrad is able to create even the idiomatic language itself of the local populace. There is no weak point, it seems to me, in all of this – the world feels real and lived-in. The attitude of the locals is built up piecemeal through each new geographical location and its associations, so that by the end of the chapter, without a single man or woman being named, the reader has the sense of a them as pious folk, superstitious and hostile towards foreigners and their wealth. We already know their speech; we even know their myths.

And as Nostromo progresses we return to these places in thought or in action, and even the figures of speech find themselves being used. The novel itself is the vindication of its first chapter, proving the reality of all that Conrad initially describes. The two parts buttress and justify each other.

An Invaluable Fellow – The Creation of Nostromo the Man

The best of Conrad’s characters embody the fragility of our understanding that came with modernism and the modern sensibility – people like Lord Jim and Kurtz, characters seen through Marlow’s eyes in glimpses, as though they are walking deep in fog. Nostromo creates its titular character in a way that takes its cue from Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim while moving beyond them. Nostromo himself, oddly enough, scarcely appears in the novel’s first two hundred pages, but we feel his presence throughout. While other characters, such as the stoic Charles Gould, owner of Sulaco’s San Tomé mine, are all focused on the creation of wealth, Nostromo himself stands out by his focus, instead, on his reputation. And in light of this, the lack of his appearance until the middle of the novel makes perfect sense – his reputation precedes him. We come to “know” him before we meet him.

But at the same time, we feel a sense of uncertainty in our knowledge of Nostromo. We come to know the facts – he is an Italian, raised in Genoa, who now is the captain of the longshoremen in Sulaco’s harbour – long before we meet the man, but we are keenly aware that they are inadequate for getting a true measure of him. When we do see Nostromo he appears in the epic mode, rather than as a normal character – his language is curt and full of an almost inhuman confidence. When he talks with one character who is mourning the fact that his son never lived past childhood Nostromo simply says “If he had been like me he would have been a man.”

His figure is also highly symbolic. For example, there is the silver-grey mare that he rides, which connects him with the mine while also making him preternaturally fast. He appears like a vengeful spirit without clear goals of his own – he lacks any kind of internality, at least in the novel’s first hundred pages or so, where his confidence and pride overcome any hint of reflexivity. At the closing moments of Part First he is present at a night-time celebration among the locals which even has more than a hint of the Dionysian about it, with “the barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum” that draws him in. There, he is confronted by a lover who demands a gift, and Nostromo, carelessly powerful, cuts off the silver buttons of his very own coat to give to her. His self-mastery is frightening and alluring.

A picture of the Panama Canal being built. Exploitation of resources doesn't come without exploitation of the people too. Conrad nudges us at times to ask if it is worth it.
The Panama Canal under construction. During Nostromo we see the Republic of Costaguana become highly developed due to its silver mine and European and American investment. But Conrad is keen to show that all of this change is not without its cost. He nudges us to consider the human consequences of all this “progress”.

The use of names is another area where Nostromo casts an epic shadow. By giving him countless names and epithets Conrad shows the multifaceted nature of his character. Even the very name “Nostromo” is not his own, but the name by which the English residents of Sulaco call him. We don’t even hear his actual name, Giovanni Fidenza, until near the book’s end. As a result, we receive the impression, yet again, that we are only scratching the surface of who he is. A great many people trust him as “a perfectly incorruptible fellow”, but others know him as “the generous, the terrible, the inconstant Capataz de Cargadores”. Who is he really?

This situation is further muddied when certain epithets, such as “incorruptible” are used not without a hint of irony – but only at times, so that we never know how much the irony reflects truth, or distracts from it. Early on in the book we are told of a character that “so far, she too was under the spell” of Nostromo’s reputation. Is the “so far” a warning, or a red herring? Does “spell” refer to something that is backed up by the rest of the story, or is it the mark of an evil man and sorcerer? I certainly shan’t reveal the truth here – I just want to indicate the range of methods by which Conrad fashions the character of Nostromo while leaving him nonetheless a mystery for us to piece together.

We see Nostromo as gestures, and we hear him more through reported speech than through his own mouth. Conrad gives us masses of information but never enough of the man to make sense of them. To my mind at least, it is a fascinating way of showing how modernism disrupted our notions of certainty and character. Conrad can’t tell us who Nostromo is, but his characters all get the chance to have a go. Yet each explanation seems to contradict the next one, leaving us even more confused than when we started out. And yet we know that under all of these explanations there must be a man. The challenge in reading Nostromo partially becomes trying to locate this man and understand who he is and what it is that drives him.

Conclusion

The depths given to Nostromo are great, but there are many other characters in the novel who are fascinating in their own way, from taciturn Englishman Charles Gould, the owner of the mine, to the indignant General Montero whose decision to start a revolution forms the key conflict of the book. It isn’t just the characters of Nostromo that make the novel great, but also its exciting plot, filled with tricks and turns including even buried treasure. Conrad lures us in with the promise of adventure, and then reveals something far more complex lying under the novel’s surface – a modern myth, yes, but also a highly political novel, and a brutally sad story of our common exploitation of the South American nations, long after formal colonialism had ended. It’s a really cool book, and thoroughly recommended. Even though I only managed to finish it the third time through…

An interesting comparison to Nostromo would probably be Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement, which I talk about here. Both novels explore the changes in sleepy rural society around the beginning of the twentieth century, and how far we should consider our notion of “progress” to be a positive thing.

Did you enjoy Nostromo as much as I did? Did Conrad’s style derange you rather than dazzle? Why not leave a comment below