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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 19th 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.

Elif Batuman – The Idiot

I bought Elif Batuman’s The Idiot because I wanted to read a contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which I suppose makes me the idiot on this particular occasion, since the connection to Dostoevsky is tenuous. Instead, it’s a novel about a naïve student on her first year at Harvard who falls in love and spends the summer in Hungary. It’s a novel with ideas, if not quite a novel of ideas. Selin, the protagonist, studies things like linguistics and the philosophy of language, and reads books like The Magic Mountain, and has an opinion on Dostoevsky. However, on the level of language this is more akin to Sally Rooney than Mann or the Russian. It’s all light and easy sentences, dialogue smooth as someone letting a slinky slide between two outstretched arms, and disorganised observations of things in rooms. It’s real in the way reality TV is real – it is existence absent of any redeeming light.

One of the criticisms I might make of it is that so much of its four hundred, easy-to-read pages, feels meaningless. The things caught in our narrator’s gaze often have neither narrative nor thematic relevance; their purpose is to make reality feel real, but often they don’t even seem to do that. The interactions between characters are regularly similarly lightweight. Yet the novel as a whole might make for itself the defence that it is actually serious about meaning, that such scenes are essential to its construction, that I am the one misunderstanding it. For indeed, being a work about language, love, and communication, it tries to treat seriously the shifting presence and absence of meaning in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps. The fact that I sit here writing this suggests maybe it’s a case worth making.

The Idiot begins in 1995 with Turkish-American Selin arriving at Harvard to begin her undergraduate studies. She meets her roommates and her classmates. She majors in linguistics and studies things in the philosophy and psychology of language. She volunteers a little of her time to teach maths and English as a second language, largely without success. She goes to the odd party but barely drinks and certainly does nothing sexual. There are many characters who drift in and out, largely undifferentiated, but there are two that are important – Ivan, an older Hungarian man Selin meets during Russian class, and Svetlana, a Serbian girl from the same class. Ivan provides a kind of love interest for Selin, while Svetlana is a kind of worldly motherly figure for her. In the summer break Selin goes to Paris with Svetlana, and from there on to Hungary, where she is to teach English to some Hungarian village children.

It makes sense to start with language, since these are the ideas that underpin the novel as a whole. With her linguistics studies, Selin tries to make sense of language itself by considering how language could be explained to Martians, or by them to us. “Supposing we went to Mars and the Martians said “gavagai” every time a rabbit ran by”, it would not be possible to know whether this referred to running, or rabbits, or something else entirely. Selin finds this depressing, as this early introduction to communication seems to suggest we cannot communicate, that meaning is trapped inside of us, never to get out. Naturally, this is an introductory class, so the fact that Selin can’t get anywhere towards solving this problem is one of those examples where a text seems to provide a problem that contains the seeds of its own later dissolution. (She should keep studying as it’s obvious she does not have the full picture yet).

The novel also challenges this “communication doesn’t work” idea through a short story for Russian learners whose chapters are scattered throughout its pages. This tells of a girl called Nina who goes to Siberia after the man she loves disappears, but one of its quirks is that the text is simplified to focus on the grammatical structures the learners are currently focusing on, such as a particular grammatical case. While the story contains plenty of miscommunications, the fact that a coherent narrative can be produced even with such obvious linguistic limitations rather suggests that it is people who are failing to communicate, rather than language itself. In other words, meaning’s general transferability is not precluded by language. Rather, it is people who are the problem. I found this a little unsatisfying – The Idiot introduces a problem only to deny it is one.

This sense that people are the problem is one we might have picked up on from the novel’s title, of course. Selin is naïve – in this she has something in common with Prince Myshkin. Since she is naïve and innocent she struggles with the articulation of her own emotions towards Ivan, turning from speech to lengthy emails that might work if they were not themselves, inevitably, an exercise in avoiding communication – they talk indirectly, and so do not reach the destination:

“Dear Selin, would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon?  Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?”

The above is one of Ivan’s, though Selin’s are no better. At times they also use Russian, a language neither of them knows well, which naturally enough does not help either. These are two people failing language. This is a point stressed when Selin is in rural Hungary teaching English, and trying and failing to fight a local fellow-teacher who insists one pronouncing all the silent vowels in English. “One”, becoming “oh-neh”, for example. Selin herself does not really seem to realise that teaching requires effort on her part, so while she is critical of her co-teacher she gets nowhere with her own students – “Papel iss blonk”, one of them says, for “the paper is white”. Failure, but human failure, everywhere.

These failures mean that Ivan and Selin do not connect in the way they should, or could, and create joint meanings together. They leave things unsaid, or said in a distorted manner. In this they are like teenagers, however, rather than people seriously struggling with a higher-order problem about the possibility of meaning transference. We might say that Batuman wants to make a point about culture here, and its relationship to this connection-building among people. Hungary and America (or Turkey) are different! Look, Ivan hasn’t read Walden. Again, the text raises this potential problem only to refute itself. The Hungarians and Turks can bond, we are told, over the shared indignities of the collapse of empire – “Trianon! Touché!” one of the Hungarians says. Even the legendarily strange Hungarian language is demystified by Batuman stressing the similarities and loanwords common to it and Turkish.

It is perhaps wrong to disparage a book called The Idiot for having an idiot at its centre or suggesting that the ideas she encounters are really less important than her own failures. (Would this not mean that writing a novel called “A bad book” would always be good, unless it were excellent?) Yet it’s wrong to dismiss how corrosive the idea of human failure can be when it becomes central. A lot of Russian novels – and Batuman loves Russian novels enough to have written a whole book on them – centre on the gap between the idea and the reality of human practices. Raskolnikov’s theory of murder, and the reality of a bloodied axe, for example. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this and what The Idiot does. Raskolnikov or Bazarov discover that human failings cause issues for their philosophies. Selin has no philosophy to be challenged, so ideas cannot be central to the work, no matter what other reviewers on the cover might say.

Perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the ideas and their potential for realisation. Communication is possible. Sometimes it’s hard, but that’s allowed. The theories on it are developed and probably, to a certain extent, the result of real thought and experimentation. Utopias, as far as we can make out, are not possible. The ideas fail because they imagine an incorrect view of human nature. Communication eludes Selin not because the theories are wrong, but because she is naïve, childish, and doesn’t really put any effort in. One approach becomes universal because it’s about all of our failings, while the other is about an individual’s failings which she will probably sort out once she has grown up a little.  

I have gone quite far from what I actually thought is the most interesting thing in this book – its use of section breaks. While Ivan and Selin’s not-relationship is the central story of the book, the bulk of it is taken up with Selin’s day-to-day experiences of being a new student in a big university. When I was about sixteen and thought I could teach myself writing through an entirely formulaic approach, I read in various places that my sections could never be shorter than 1’500 words and should always include some kind of conflict. This number has stuck with me even as it has never helped me much with my own writing. With The Idiot, Batuman doesn’t follow this rule either. Many of its sections are impressionistic and under a page in length. They accumulate, creating a sense of Selin’s experience of Harvard. They are snatches of conversations, or things spotted from a window. They are not, really, meaningful – even within a mesh of novelistic themes and meanings. But they are the brocade out of which the novel as a whole is built.

What is mildly interesting here is the way that Batuman builds meaning into this use of length and brevity. On the one hand, this is most obvious in the way that once the not-romance gets going, the sections with Ivan are considerably longer than the sections without him. It’s a quite direct way of putting the disorganised meaninglessness of the earlier sections into perspective by showing the paucity of their development quite literally on the page. On the other, and more thematically curious, is the way that this relates to Selin’s friendship with Svetlana. There is a moment when Svetlana reveals that she used to be bulimic and the narrative cannot contend with this fact, so the section just ends. It’s not presented as something deeply revealing from Svetlana within context, but Selin’s lack of reaction is another indication about the meaning-problem of the novel. Selin is yet again too immature, too naïve, to appreciate what her friend has told her. It’s not relevant to her own story.

If there’s something close to an epiphany to cap The Idiot, it’s the discovery by Selin that she is not the centre of the world, only of her world. This little bulimia mention is one example, as are the countless new people that she meets in Hungary: “I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.”

I can be charitable and say that the novel begins with a meaningless mass of impressions, grows more formally clear at its centre with Ivan, then ends up with a return to those same disconnected impressions. Only this time, Selin has a new consciousness of what they mean through her slightly-increased maturity. She has a sense that even if they are disconnected and non-narrativised to herself, they may be formed and clear in others’ worlds. Indeed, perhaps that’s one hidden message of all the teaching in the novel – that a teacher, like Selin herself, can have an impact on her students far greater than she herself would ever know.

Anyway, it was a reasonably funny, easy-to-read, work of contemporary fiction. Now I can go back to the dead.

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.