Typhoon

A novella informed by Conrad's own experiences with a real-life Captain McWhir (one "r"). It shows the historical switch to metal steamships, the crew are engineers, not sailors, and portrayed as brutes or soulless. The captain reflects his ship - a steely lack of imagination indifferent to the forces of nature - contrary to the romance of sail. The best part is the ending - there is none! At the climactic moment, time jumps back to port. It is up to you to fill in the blank. Post-modernism, or a failure of imagination? The steam ship has lost something of the heroic.

One of the greatest examples in literature of landscape and nature treated as character. Although on one level this classic sea story is about the uneasy relations between the phlegmatic captain and his high-strung first mate, the antagonist, and in many ways the main character, is the storm itself:

This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one's kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were--without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.

This is my favorite of Conrad's novels, simply because the writing is so strong, evoking all the senses--you can feel it, show more hear, smell and taste the wind and water, and of course visualize it in all its shadowy hues, while the currents of man versus man, and men versus the elements, rage around each other like the storm itself. At the end, I felt like I had to rinse the salt water from my body. show less

This grips and engrosses, and evokes the fearsome moments anyone who's been in heavy water in heavy weather knows too well without being pedantic about it (no one drowns--just about that helplessness with drowning somewhere at the back of the mind). It does it well, and so you dwell on the weather and water and not on the weird stuff about what makes a bold sailor bold and what turns a Chinaman into a beast.

Compared to Youth and Heart of Darkness, this is screamingly funny, though Conrad's sense of humor is dry as a bone. It's a little like the first part of Darkness, where Marlow is dealing with the corrupt Europeans and before he goes off into the jungle -- it's the sarcastic commentary without the horrific self-scrutiny.

Fieldnotes:
1 Unimaginative Stolid Captain (closely resembling a Bear of Very Little Brain)
1 Excitable First Mate
1 Brand New Ship
200 Irascible Chinese workers
1 Hellacious Titular Typhoon
Several Instances of Regrettable (though Period-Appropriate) Racism

The Short Version
On the whole an interesting enough tale of how people react in a crisis - and how they respond to authority/someone else taking responsibility no matter how ill-conceived the plan. But I was never particularly engaged nor captivated and the little side-story about the Chinese workers locked in the hold fighting over money was distasteful and I'm not sure why it was in the least bit necessary.

Typhoon draws on Joseph Conrad's own seagoing experience to tell the story of the crew of the Nan-Shan, who encounter a typhoon of monumental proportions. The nautical and meteorological descriptions were great, but the depiction of the Chinese coolies was not, so I would rate this a 3.5. This is certainly the most straightforward and interesting of the Conrads I've read so far (the other two are The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness).

Conrad was a Naturalist (determinist). This is the story of a captain and his cargo ship that runs into a typhoon. There is no escaping. The captain and crew are not in control of the typhoon or their fate; destiny will do with them what it will. One of the things Conrad explores is how people behave in such situations. Here, he explores what the captain will do with his passengers, something he does have control over. The captain is a bit of an odd duck and not always a reader's favorite, but ask yourself if he does the right thing?