Victory by Joseph Conrad, 0192817086, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

Correction!

This is not an abridged edition! (2001 reviewer is mistaken, or referring to a different edition.)

The last in a fine series of novels

Victory is the last of Conrad's novels set in the Malay Archipelago. A young Axel Heyst emerges from the unhappy shadow of his father, a controversial philisopher, and embarks on self-imposed exile, not only from London, but from humanity. He moves stubbornly in his separate orbit until a chance meeting with a girl who is leading a miserable life with an itinerant orchestra. They elope and try to resume Heyst's habitual seclusion, but the outside world intrudes with brutal and fatal inevitability.

Conrad, as always, writes vividly of the turmoil of man set against the terrible beauty of Nature. His style might seem faintly quaint now, but Victory is in many respects a modern novel. There is a playfulness with which Conrad presents Heyst at first in a slightly ridiculous light, but then peels away the layers of his character to reveal a complex man who is deeply misunderstood. The narrator is elusive and peripheral, which emphasizes the dream-like quality of Heyst's fugue, and rather than unfolding the narrative in a linear fashion, he passes backwards and forwards over events from a constantly shifting perspective.

Conrad comments in the preface that he wrote the last word of the book - its title - in the dying moments of peace before the outbreak of the First World War. Victory, with its skilful blending of the classical and the modern, is is some ways a great novelist's epitaph to a passing age.

Conrad's most fascinating and haunting novel

Although rarely considered Conrad's greatest achievement - and I do rate other novels of his as even better myself - this is my favourite Conrad work. Heyst is an extremely complex and subtel character; his relationship with the woman he "rescues" is sublimely erotic, yet doomed to a plausible, moving and haunting end.
The vindictive hotelkeeper makes for a banal, believable fatal prime mover in the plot; and Mr Jones and his henchmen are successfully portrayed as hilarious and frightening. The enigmatic Chinese servant that floats around Heyst is another memorable minor character.

If you love Conrad, please do read this extraordinary novel.

Any Conrad is Better Than Most Novels

Though I include Conrad in the league of "master novelists," Victory falls short of his best work.
One problem involves the work's narrative form. Conrad, who had proven in 1904 with Nostromo that he could minuplate narrative masterfully, performs some sleight-of-hand trickery here that tends to disconcert, rather than amaze the reader. On the one hand the narrator is a first-person, frivolous quidnunc, listening in on and reporting on conversations he overhears on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. At other times, he is an omniscient narrator, privy to all the private diologue and thought that take place on Samburan and elsewhere. Only once do we see him refer to himself as a character in the story, during a brief conversation he has with Davidson about Mrs. Schomberg. The same narrative technique is used by Dostoevsky in The Possessed, but I didn't find it as obtrusive there.

Aside from the narrative jumble, Conrad also fumbles with diologue here. Most of the diologue is between Heyst and Lena and is of so saccharine a variety, one half expects to hear MGM violins playing in the background. Purple, sentimental language is but one aspect of the melodramatic tone of the novel as a whole. The central plot, pitting the lover's happiness against Ricardo's and Jones' dastardly machinations is more characteristic of Victorian romance than Conrad at his best. Another of the shifts towards melodrama is exhibited in the work's one-dimensional charcters. Lena and Heyst clearly represent good. Ricardo and Jones clearly represent evil. Since Ricardo and Jones, and their ape-dog, Pedro, are so thinly dilineated, they appear comic, rather than operating as true dramatic foils to Heyst. Conrad attempts to counter the comic shallowness of his vilains by dressing them in Satan's clothing. The "Paradise Lost" motif is one of the most obvious in the book, yet, like most of Conrad's themes here, it leads nowhere, ultimately. Adam and Eve are represented by Lena and Heyst. Satan is a bit more ambiguous, only insofar as he is represented in composite by Jones and Ricardo.

The Genesis and Miltonic backdrop really picks up steam in part 111, when Heyst announces "There must be a lot of the original Adam in me after all." While representations of Lena as Eve are slightly more subtle, they are abundant nevertheless. The repeated image of Lena standing before Heyst with her hair cascading down over her white shoulders vividly recalls Milton's depictions of the "mother of mankind." Lest we have any doubts about it, Heyst tells Lena "You are different. Woman is the tempter."

Jones and Ricardo as a Satanic composite takes a slightly closer reading to get at: "Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint puff of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays on the dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the grave of the sun." One would have to have some familiarity with Milton and with the Old Testament to catch the Satanic reference here. In Isa. xiv, 12, the prophet refers to Venus as "Lucifer, son of the morning." Milton associates Satan with "the morning star" (PL V). More often than not, however, Conrad is not this subtle. Jones (Satan in rebellion) identifies himself as "He that is'" when talking to Heyst. This places Heyst in apposition to that other Supernatural Being who tells Moses "I am that I am." Elsewhere, Jones tells Heyst that he has been "ejected" from his proper sphere, "because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions...he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth." Ricardo, who represents Satan in activity, talks often of not having to crawl about on his belly anymore. When he attacks Lena, Conrad describes him as a serpent, with his arms pinned to his sides and his body sawying like a cobra's. Lest we should still be in the dark about Lena's Eve function, we learn (again from the omniscient narrator who can see into people's dreams)that Lena has had a dream of foreboding, which parallels Eve's precognitive dream in PL. As an even more convincing proof, we see Lena in a conquering pose, her foot above Ricardo's head, recalling The Angel's message in the final book of PL that Eve's descendent will vanquish Satan and hold his head underfoot.

All that said, Conrad, even when operating at less than peak capacity, is still a more interesting novelist than 99% of all others. But for those who want to read a perfectly-crafted, controlled and masterfully written novel, I would suggest they turn to Nostromo. Then come back to this book and read it for enjoyment, for it's still a good read, just not as fulfilling as literature.

Interesting, imaginative; capturing tradgedy

As an abridged version, the pace of events seems quite fast and disconnected at the start, with some characters appearing and disappearing. However, this is necessary to set the scene for a strange situation to arise and come to its conclusion. Perhaps Pride and Prejudice would have been a suitable title instead! Excellent use of language, building of characters and situations. This shows life in the tropics in quite a different light.

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