Chance

There’s a good reason why you never knew Conrad wrote this novel: it’s a minor work. The writing quality is high but also needlessly dense and repetitive too much of the time. The story line is interesting but takes forever to play out. I almost gave up out of boredom thrice but stayed the course hoping it would improve, which it didn’t. This is another of Conrad’s less successful efforts. It’s certainly no Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness.

This is one of the few Conrads that I had not read before. From the descriptions I had gotten a wrong impression and had stayed away in the past. I expected a sombre rumination of female problems. Wrong expectations!It is Marlow's last performance, and it is more land-based than his 3 previous tales; but not entirely! Marlow has matured and has broader interests, he is looking into society, describes a strangely modern financial fraudster, takes up women's movement as a subject, with less than full enthusiasm.Marlow has changed his sense of humour, he is an ironist now. Past Marlows were entirely un-humorous, to the extent that I mistook him for Conrad and was surprised how funny some of Conrad's non-Marlow tales are. Take Secret Agent!Chance is as funny as Secret Agent. And yet it is also a Victorian standard plot, a damsel in distress story as any of the wildest romances of the previous century. If one would want to summarize the 'plot', it would sound very pedestrian, so I don't do it.Like Lord Jim, this novel started as a short story, initially called Dynamite. Like Rescue, Chance was interrupted and took years to be completed. Like Victory, it was an amazing commercial success for a writer who was a typical writer's writer: high reputation, little business. This book sold like hot cakes in the US and gave Conrad a comfortable last decade of his life.One might suspect the bestseller status was due to a misunderstanding, and the introduction to this edition presumes that Chance was a very unread bestseller. I am not so sure. The novel is quite entertaining. While the plot (fraudster's daughter in existential trouble gets rescued by sailor after going through all kinds of other people's schemes) is nothing spectacular, the manner of telling it is a very amusing way of the Marlow narration style: he collects bits and pieces from several sources and the tale's story is happening over 17 years. It is never a difficult structure and Marlow's ponderous style in, say, the Heart, is replaced by light-handed banter.I found it very enjoyable.'Luckily people are for the most part quite incapable of understanding what is happening to them; a merciful provision of nature to preserve an average amount of sanity.'

This is an interesting and entertaining book which is very unlike Conrad's sea tales, although it involves sailors, including the familiar "Marlowe" of "Heart of Darkness" fame. I started reading this in a battered paperback which fell apart faster than I could read, so I ordered this hard cover, large-type edition.The book is well made and it is large enough that there are about as many words on a page as there are in a paperback. I find many large-type books to be annoying because one is rapidly turning pages due to the small number of words on each page.I recommend this book both as literature and as a good well-made book.

The Kindle version of this was fine. The novel itself was just OK. Based on other reviews, I expected to enjoy it more. The conceit of the story being told by "Marlow" from interactions with the novel's characters wears very thin after a few chapters: I don't find Marlow's supposed verbal narration of the action at all believable. I'll have to reread Heart of Darkness...

So well-crafted, so engaging, so powerfully written - it's hard believing "Chance" was written by Joseph Conrad. Not that Conrad didn't write great books, just that nothing in "Lord Jim," "Heart Of Darkness," or the rest of his tough, unsettling oeuvre prepares you for the wry warmth and hidden sunlight of "Chance."Well, you do have Marlow again. The narrator of "Jim" and "Darkness" is back here telling another story about people he doesn't actually know first-hand. This time the central character is young Flora de Barral, set adrift in England by her father's scandal-plagued financiering. Haunted and helpless, her wide blue eyes giving her the look of "a forsaken elf," Flora takes what comes in life, seemingly unable to function for herself. Can she find her own way? Will she become ruthless if she tries?All this may sound precious and twee, very much in the style of period romances more suited to Henry James than what you expect from the shamelessly macho Conrad, with his damned souls sailing heedless into typhoons. Yet Conrad makes this odd Merchant-Ivory production work by making you care for Flora in a way that draws you in more deeply than even the classic "Lord Jim" ever did. "Jim" was a philosophical novel; "Chance" is a uniquely intuitive one, more about feelings than ideas, yet quite brilliant in its concept all the same.Published in 1913, one year before World War I would change forever the genteel world it so painstakingly describes, "Chance" was the one book by Conrad that clicked with readers in his own lifetime. It's been disregarded since, as modern readers embrace more dour Conrad fare like "The Secret Agent" and "Nostromo."It's our generation's loss. Missing "Chance" is missing the other side of Conrad, the bleak nihilist discovering for once "the precise workmanship of chance, fate, providence, call it what you will." Other Conrad books feature broken-up narratives and odd framing devices, but the structural convolutions in "Chance" actually propel the story rather than hold it back.Marlow's narration is a marvel of storytelling economy, carrying you across windswept moors and the high seas, not to mention a source of much dry wit as the rather mysterious misogynist fires many shots across the bow of womankind. "Mainly I resent that pretence of winding us around their dear little fingers, as of right," he snorts.Is Flora exhibit A in this case against? Certainly she winds the helplessly infatuated Captain Anthony around her finger, despite her apparent total lack of reciprocal devotion. Flora does love, only it is in a flawed way, for her crabbed, corrupt father who believes the two of them too good for the rest of the world. Yet love can be a form of redemption despite itself.Women, Conrad writes, can be fiendish and dumb, yet they are "never dense." "There is in woman always, somewhere, a spring." Realizing that spring here is at the heart of "Chance," and makes for Conrad's strangest triumph, the one book of his that not only makes you feel smarter for reading it, but happy to be alive.