Tales of Hearsay

With the first two stories of this volume, "The Warrior's Soul" and "Prince Roman," Conrad looks back on his native Poland and Russia. But he does so in a decidedly altered fashion. It is not at his own early years but at his grandfather's life. His is a look through time, almost with a nostalgic tinge, first, to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, and, second, to the Cadet Revolution against Russia in 1830-31. The stories lack the psychological layering of his best work, but they are still insightful on that score. And the use of ironic twists at the end gives them a sense of satisfied wholeness that is mostly eschewed in Conrad's heavier work. As we read them, too, another factor is at work. Conrad composed these tales a century after the show more first story and eighty years after the second. We read them more than a century after that. In effect, we look nostalgically on Conrad's writings, which themselves employ an element of nostalgia, making for a perspective similar to standing between two mirrors and seeing multiple reflections of existence.

The third story, "The Tale," is not that, it turns out. It is a confession and highlights a naval commander's inner guilt generated by an act of vengeance during wartime. And the last story, "The Black Mate," is a tale of coming to terms with the supernatural through expediency. Its almost whimsical ironic end itself is upended just a few paragraphs later into a warning against self possession.

The landscape and setting for these tales is different from that of his great works set in the tropics or on the China Sea. These landscapes tell of ice and snow. The forests are barren, in contrast to the jungles and growth of the tropics, which are so thick that in their own teeming richness of life they seem to squeeze the spirit from the bodies of the Europeans caught up in them. Funny, that surrounded by life in the tropics, Conrad's heroes seem more alone than they ever are on plains of European Russia or the brutal northern seas. show less

An odds and ends collection of short-stories which spans Conrad's literary career published shortly after his death. It works surprisingly well. 'The Warrior's Soul' and 'Prince Roman' are perhaps the least interesting, although the latter draws on Conrad's Polish heritage. 'The Black Mate', an early story, shows Conrad had a great sense of humour. The Captain, a fervent spiritualist, anticipates the superstitious First Mate, Ransome, in 'The Shadow Line'. Best of all is 'The Tale', Conrad's only story about the First World War. A Royal Navy ship on patrol encounters a ship from a neutral country, which is suspected of supplying German U-boats. The story is, quite literally, about the 'fog of war' and has a savage twist at the end which show more had me thinking long after I had finished it. show less