How reading Joseph Conrad has changed with the times

As critical consensus about Victory has shifted over the last century, so many different aspects of his work have been revealed

There’s a long and noble tradition of literary critics misunderstanding Joseph Conrad. Partly that’s because he is such a complicated, dense and fascinating writer. Far more words have been written about him than he ever wrote himself – and not everyone can get it right all the time. Especially when you throw combustible postcolonial issues into the mix.

Time has a cruel habit of amplifying those mistakes. A century after he was writing, any negative predictions about Conrad’s long-term durability, for instance, seem hilariously misguided.

But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea.

We shall make expeditions into the later books and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most of us untrodden. It is the earlier books – Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ – that we shall read in their entirety.

Heyst’s smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great mustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortably as a shy bird in its native thicket.

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