Lord Jim: A Tale (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Lord Jim is a fine novel, and reviews of other editions can explain why better than I can. But I would like to recommend this older Penguin edition for first time readers. The introductory essay and notes are rich, and other editions must have similarly enlightening commentary. But this edition has a chronology--not of Conrad's life, but of Jim's. It's really helpful and very cleverly put together based on comments made by Marlow, Jim, or other characters in the course of the story. It also has a list of leitmotifs which are intriguing. These are not huge things but they made my reading more pleasurable, and may make this edition a better choice than the Oxford or newer Penguin editions.

I did not expect to enjoy this book, and it took a little while to get into it, but I found myself enthralled--and by the conclusion, moved--almost against my will.

Conrad's style here is a bit moody for my personal taste, but beautiful nonetheless. He makes brilliant use of the English language and is a master of the judicious metaphor. He draws you in as he slowly unravels his tale of an "overly romantic" man and his "exquisite egoism."

While Conrad doesn't quite compare with the great romanticists like Hugo and Dostoevsky, Lord Jim is one of the last great romantic novels, certainly far superior to almost any fiction being written today.

In my younger days, I was thought to be a very bright student. But when I first read this book, I had no idea in the world what it was all about. Why? Because it's a story of a world that has long since disappeared, a world where duty and responsibility were infinitely more important than your own life, especially when you were part of a ship's crew. Conrad was so deeply embedded in this vanished world that he felt no need to outline his story in specific terms. In fact, I believe that doing do would have been extremely painful for him to attempt because his concept of the duty of a ship's crew was so rigid. Thus when I was only 20 years old, the moral heart of this tale was merely smoke and mirrors to me. What was all the fuss about? So what if a young sailor slips and falls into a lifeboat? I say slips and falls because the moral resonance of that fall is as ambiguous as the hauntings at the heart of Henry James's Turn Of The Screw. We don't really know what was going through Jim's mind because, as Conrad hints, Jim himself didn't know. One moment he was on the bridge of the crippled Patna, and the next second he was in the lifeboat with the other officers and the captain. Their intention to desert the helpless passengers is not in dispute. But at the fatal instant of Jim's fall, as terrible a fall as that of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, Conrad flinches away from his "inside view" (cf. Wayne Booth) of Jim's mind, as if the truth were too terrible to reveal. One wonders whether, even then, Jim's action was all that bad. If the captain believed that the ship was fatally damaged, this could be interpreted as an "every man for himself" scenario. If it was literally impossible to save the passengers due to lack of lifeboats, was there any point in going down with the ship? Jim's guilt is a result purely of hindsight. The Patna sturdily and improbably refused to sink, and the stage was set for scapegoating. Because scapegoats needed to be found. There was plenty of blame to go around. The shipping company was reckless to load an obsolete rust bucket with a huge load of passengers. The captain and crew were reckless to take such a ship out to sea. What about their duty to the passengers and to humanity? It was much easier to load the burden onto the lowest ranking people in the food chain, namely Jim and the rest of the crew. So what we have here is a little deeper than a classic tale of the cowardly abandonment of one's duty. It is ultimately a tale of false pride, of fatal arrogance on the part of young Jim, who gave his own actions a significance much greater than they actually warranted. The fact that the Patna didn't sink, but could have sunk, had nothing to do with Jim because he couldn't personally control the outcome. Ultimately his actions were totally meaningless in terms of any practical result. So he plunged himself into a meaningless hell of his own making. When staying on a doomed ship could achieve nothing, why not make the jump? It wasn't the same situation as that recent cruise ship sinking in Italy, where there were plenty of lifeboats, and a better management of the evacuation of the passengers could easily have saved many lives. The Patna had only a couple of small boats and hundreds of passengers. So why invent a context of failed heroism when any attempt at heroism would have been useless? If we thicken the analysis of Lord Jim in this fashion, it goes a lot deeper than than the cowardice of one young sailor. Instead, it becomes an existential parable of our ultimate helplessness in the face of fateful disasters. It illuminates our ultimate helplessness when confronted by fatal situations. And it exposes the failure and futility of the rigid moral codes that Conrad thought he believed. I don't think that he realized the true depths of his own story. In the end, his own honesty triumphed over the false tinsel of the Victorian vision of chivalry and knightly honor that was very soon to vanished forever in the evil trenches of World War One and the massive stupid slaughter of the Somme and Verdun. If rigid moral codes result in millions of men walking into machine gun fire, then what in hell is the use of these rigid moral codes? Why should Jim have tried to act like Sir Galahad? When viewed from this angle, Lord Jim has a secret subtext that gets very close to modern existentialism. You may very reasonably object that Conrad couldn't have realized all this when he was writing the story. But I will reply that this is the best possible proof of the greatness of this remarkable book. The greatest literature makes sense on many different levels and this is what makes Conrad a great author.