Where to Start with Joseph Conrad

Many readers come to Joseph Conrad through Heart of Darkness, because it is short and famous, and a fair number stop partway through. The sentences are long, the story is told at second hand by a man sitting on a boat, and the narrative circles instead of advancing. Readers who give up often decide that Conrad is not for them, when the real problem is that they started with the densest short book he wrote.

Part of the difficulty is that English was Conrad’s third language. He was born in 1857 into a Polish-speaking family under Russian rule, grew up with Polish and French, and did not begin learning English until he was about twenty and serving on British ships. His sentences are long, with clauses that qualify or reverse what came before, and his word choices can have a formal, slightly translated feel. The effect is deliberate and rewards a slower pace, but it is a real adjustment, and a short piece is the place to make it.

This guide proposes an order beginning with the story “Youth” and explains what to expect from four works available free on Project Gutenberg. It describes openings, narrators, and structure. It does not reveal how any of them ends.

First choice: Youth

The Gutenberg eBook Youth, a Narrative contains only the one story, about sixteen thousand words.¹ It opens around a mahogany table in England where five men sit over claret: a director of companies, an accountant, a lawyer, a man named Marlow, and the unnamed narrator who reports what Marlow says. Marlow then tells of his first voyage as second mate, at the age of twenty, on an old barque called the Judea, carrying coal from a northern port to Bangkok, with the motto “Do or Die” painted under her name.

Why begin here? Everything that makes Conrad hard is present in miniature, and so is everything that makes him worth the trouble. The frame of men listening is the device used again in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, so you learn to hear Marlow’s voice in a story of an evening rather than a week. The events are physical and clear: a leaking ship, repeated delays, a long passage. Marlow is forty-two when he tells it and openly nostalgic about being twenty; the gap between teller and young man is the thing to notice.

“Youth” appeared in 1898 and was later gathered with Heart of Darkness and “The End of the Tether” into one volume, which Gutenberg does not hold as a single book.

Second choice: Heart of Darkness

The novella begins aboard the Nellie, a cruising yawl at anchor on the Thames near Gravesend, with the same company as “Youth”: the Director, the Lawyer, the Accountant, Marlow, and the narrator.² Marlow recalls taking command of a river steamboat for a trading company in Africa and travelling upriver to relieve an agent named Kurtz. The river and the country are never named in the text.

Why second? After “Youth” you know the frame and the voice, and you know that Marlow digresses in order to approach something he cannot say directly. The book is in three parts, which gives you three natural sessions. Read part one for the approach: the company offices in a European city, the coastal voyage, the Company’s station where Marlow waits for his boat to be repaired. Much of what the book has to say about the colonial enterprise is already there before anyone reaches Kurtz. When a paragraph loses its thread, ask what Marlow is literally seeing; the abstractions rest on concrete observations.

Third choice: Lord Jim

Lord Jim is a full novel of forty-five chapters.³ The first four are told in the third person and introduce Jim, a young ship’s officer, and the Patna, an old steamer carrying pilgrims, on which something happens that leads to an official inquiry. From chapter 5, Marlow takes over and tells the rest to a group of listeners, as he does in the shorter works.

Why third? It extends “Youth” directly: another young officer, another old ship, but this time the subject is a failure rather than an endurance. Jim’s case is examined through witnesses and through conversations Marlow has long after the inquiry, and the chronology moves back and forth. A reader who has followed Marlow through two shorter narratives can hold the pieces together.

Conrad’s Author’s Note, dated 1917 and included in the Gutenberg text, admits that reviewers complained no man could talk for so long. Read it after the novel, since it discusses the book’s shape. Try to read the Patna chapters in as few sittings as possible; what Jim did and when is the ground for everything afterwards.

Fourth choice: The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale was published in 1907 and is a different kind of book.⁴ There is no Marlow and no sea. Mr Verloc keeps a small shop in a narrow street in Soho, lives above it with his wife Winnie, her mother, and Winnie’s brother Stevie, and is also in the pay of a foreign embassy. In the opening chapters an embassy official, Mr Vladimir, demands that Verloc arrange a bomb outrage and proposes Greenwich as the target because the whole civilised world has heard of it.

Why fourth? The thirteen chapters move among anarchists, police officers including Chief Inspector Heat and an Assistant Commissioner, a government minister, and the Verloc household, and the time scheme jumps so that you sometimes learn the result of an event before the event itself. By this point you will be used to Conrad withholding and rearranging. The tone is colder and more sardonic than the sea fiction, and the domestic scenes carry more weight than a plot summary suggests. The dedication to H. G. Wells in the front matter places the book beside the Edwardian novel of London life.

Which book first?

Readers who want more sea fiction from another writer can look at Melville beyond Moby-Dick. For a writer of the same decade with a very different pace, see Kipling’s short stories.

Content notes

Heart of Darkness uses racist language, including the slur “nigger,” in Marlow’s narration as well as in dialogue. African people are mostly described rather than heard, often in terms of bodies, noise, and shadow. The book depicts the violence of the ivory trade directly: a chain-gang of labourers in iron collars, a grove where sick men have been left to die, a punishment beating, and a written injunction to exterminate. The book’s attitude to all this has been argued over for decades, and this guide does not try to settle that argument. It states only that the material is there and is not softened.

“Youth” describes the East in period terms, including the phrase “brown nations ruled by kings more cruel than Nero.” In Lord Jim the pilgrims aboard the Patna are seen as a mass, Malay characters are described in the language of the time, and the plot includes violent death. The Secret Agent includes a bomb explosion and its physical aftermath, and Stevie, described in the text as “a little peculiar,” is treated with the vocabulary of 1907.

How to read Conrad on BlueReader

Each of the four books has an EPUB download on its Project Gutenberg page. Save the file, upload it to BlueReader, and once the server has finished processing it the book appears on your bookshelf and remembers your place whichever device you open it on.⁵

The three parts of Heart of Darkness and the short chapters of Lord Jim work well in sessions. If a passage stays opaque, read it aloud; the rhythm often clarifies the sense before the vocabulary does. For other long-form adventure fiction that pairs well with Conrad, see classic adventure novels.