Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad is a writer I have been meaning to read for years.  I knew he had written some of the great classics in literature. What I didn't know is that prior to beginning his writing career, Conrad had spent his early years at sea starting out as a sailor and eventually rising to the level of ship's captain with the British Merchant Service.  He uses this knowledge about sea travel to marvelous effect in Lord Jim published 1900, a novel that deals with guilt and redemption.

And so, when Lord Jim begins it is the late 19th century.  Jim, the title character, is a young English maritime officer who has grown bored with his profession.  As a young boy he read stories of high drama at sea, a chance to be a hero and test oneself against the elements.  But Jim has been sailing for a few years and his voyages have been uneventful.

And then Jim accepts a job on the Patna, a ship carrying 800 passengers on a pilgrimage to Mecca.  The voyage starts out routine but suddenly at night the Patna hits something and begins sinking.  Jim watches in horror as his fellow officers and the captain get into one of the few lifeboats prepared to abandon ship with the passangers sleeping below.  Jim doesn't want to get into the lifeboat:

"He was not afraid of death perhaps, but I'll tell you what, he was afraid of the emergency.  His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped - all the appalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of.  He might have been resigned to die, but I suspect he wanted to die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance".

And so at the last moment, with Jim fearing the chaos that will ensue, he jumps into the lifeboat.  A day or two later a French ship rescues Jim and the officers and they learn that the Patna miraculously has also been rescued.  All of the passengers are safe. An inquiry is held back in England.  Jim's fellow officers don't bother to show up and their sea licenses are revoked.  Jim insists on attending the inquiry believing possibly that he can convince the court that he behaved differently somehow than his colleagues.  However his officer's licsence is revoked as well.

It is during the inquiry that we are introduced to the novel's narrator Captain Charles Marlow who attends the inquiry and though Marlow doesn't appprove of how Jim behaved he is empathetic.  Maybe he sees some of himself in Jim.  Throughout the book Marlow tries to figure out Jim's psychology.  What is he searching for in terms of finding peace? It's not a fascination I shared at first.  I didn't judge Jim for what he did.  Who knows how any of us would have behaved?  But it seemed that Jim didn't so much feel guilt as shame and he was angry about that.  He was angry a good deal of the time.

Marlow tries to set Jim up with other jobs at sea under a different name but then someone would mention the Patna at the new place he worked and Jim would walk off.  Why couldn't Jim find some other career and most important where was his gratitude that the 800 passengers had survived?  Jim is upset that the image he had of himself didn't measure up in a crisis but you can recover from shame and humiliation.  It's alot harder to recover from the kind of guilt he would have suffered if the passengers had drowned.

Jim finally lands a job managing a trading post on a remote island where they have never heard of the Patna.  It's a chance to prove himself and start anew.  He falls in love with a young woman named Jewel and the native people see him as a great leader (Lord Jim) due to his protecting them when he first arrives.  Jim has found peace and his friend Marlow who visits notices the change.  Jim cares about the local population and has a number of ideas to make improvements on the island.  This ideal circumstance though cannot last.  I won't go any further as to why except to say that my image of Jim changed.  He shows himself in the end to be the romantic, mysterious young man that Marlow suspected he was all along and very brave as well.

I recommend Lord Jim.  Book four on my 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic tragic novel.