Joseph Conrad's Victory

[BONUS] Jeeminy, this was a long novel...

Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale. Doubleday, 1920 [1915]. 462 pp.

The most recent entries in the Kent edition of Conrad’s corpus has focused on his tropical tales in the Indian ocean. The particular centerpiece was the Lingard Trilogy. While there was a detour to a landlocked tragicomic thriller in Secret Agent, on the horizon are the dark classics like the Marlow narratives.

But we’re not out of the tropical belt of Joseph Conrad’s fictional map just yet. We’re jumping all the way from the beginning of his career to his very late period, with another escapist archipelago narrative that came out when World War One was already underway — a fact that gave the author a lot of unease.

Conrad published Victory as his follow-up to the blockbusting Chance, which comes way early in the Kent edition’s ordering.

I must say, while the narrative here was much clearer to follow than Marlow’s incursive yarn, the novel itself read extremely long in a similar way. Every dialogue scene is interminable, growing over multiple chapter breaks! Was Conrad searching for a Henry James-type of semi-dramaturgical fiction with these protracted yapping sessions?