JOSEPH CONRAD – Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Originally published serially in monthly installments of T.P.’s Weekly. First published in book form, 1904. Reprinted many times.

   I got into reading Joseph Conrad, and though I’ve yet to find anything as good as Victory, he remains a source of interest. Almyer’s Folly (1895) and Chance (1913) are relatively uneventless; there’s action in them — piracy, gun-running, swindles, murder — but it all seems to happen at one remove, like an artifact the reader discovers rather than an event happening to the characters.

   Nostromo (1904), on the other hand, offers an epic of Flashman proportions, with wars, plots, betrayals, treasure, hair’s-breadth escapes and a thoughtful ending splashed across a colorful Latin-American background.

   Amid all this struts the eponymous Nostromo, officially little more than the foreman of dock loaders in a small coastal town of a banana republic, but a local hero of some stature — the book opens with his cargadores putting down a riot and saving the lives of his old friends, then parading through the town in triumph. Nostromo, though, is a bit more than just a B-movie swashbuckler, and as he finds himself smuggling a barge full of silver out of the nation before the Revolutionaries can get it, then riding recklessly cross-country to fetch help for his beleaguered employers, he begins to wonder just what he’s doing all this for.

   Had Nostromo just revolved around its hero, like any sensible adventure story, it would have been — well —  just any sensible adventure story. Nostromo, however, remains just a piece of the complex and colorful canvas that is Nostromo, as Conrad evokes a host of three-dimensional characters to play off its hero (Obsessive miner, mysterious doctor, boulevardier activist, local outlaw, etc), and provides them with detailed histories of their own.

   I should add, perhaps, that this does not exactly produce an easily readable tale: there are flashbacks within flashbacks, flash-forwards and (I think) flash-forwards within flash-forwards, all of which make for a — um — challenging read. They do not, however, vitiate the power of the action scenes or obscure the haunting irony of Nostromo‘s — and Nostromo’s — end.

   
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NOTE: Dan’s review of the 1997 BBC TV miniseries based on the book can be found here.