Review:Conrad:The Rescue (S.H.H.)

Carlo

Review:Conrad:The Rescue (S.H.H.) written by Author:S. H. H.

Review:de la Mare:Poems, 1901 to 1918 (Fairley)

From The Canadian Forum, November 1920, p.56

The Rescue, by Joseph Conrad (J. M. Dent and Sons). There are some books which by a transient cleverness or rapid movement of adventure hold the reader's attention for a first reading, but on a second reading are dropped like uninteresting or undesirable acquaintances. There are several of Conrad's books that will hardly stand the test of a second reading. But after reading his latest book, "The Rescue," for the third time, it is borne in upon one, to use the ancient solemn Quaker phrase, that no greater novel has ever been written. He has called it 'A Romance of the Shallows.' But the shallows and the deeps lie close together. The shallows of Martin Travers' pigmy soul, of Shaw the fat and foolish mate, of the conventional world of European society, of Daman and Tengga, of the Carimata Sea, of the low lonely sandbank, fall away abruptly into the contrasting depths of passion, honour, faithfulness, despair, of a real world stripped of conventions, lit up by the lightning flashes of crisis, where Tom Lingard, Edith Travers, Hassim and Immada, Jaffir, play out the drama of a Rescue for which an unutterable price is paid.

One has a sense, in looking back over Conrad's literary achievement, of a blast furnace, a whitely glowing crucible, into which the material of human experience is thrown, to emerge in various strange and beautiful shapes, always significant, sometimes tantalizing, always with some element that teases the mind with a feeling that the perfection of the craftsman's vision has not yet been realized. Now at last out of the furnace has come a form of perfect and undying beauty. We are no longer at once attracted and repelled by Marlow's devious ways; no longer are we forced to travel backwards and forwards along the converging threads of the spider's web of Nostromo. With an unfaltering directness, a sureness, a divine inevitablencss like the movement of fate, the story moves on its way, from its calm 'far-born prelude' to the final crash of dissolving elements. The final scene on the lonely sandbank between Lingard and Edith Travers is unapproachable. "The overhelming sense of immensity, of disturbing emptiness, which affects those who walk on the sands in the midst of the sea, intimidated Mrs. Travers. The world resembled a limitless flat shadow which was motionless and elusive. Then against the southern stars she saw a human form that isolated and lone appeared to be immense: the shape of a giant outlined amongst the constellations."

Conrad creates the illusion of this immensity throughout. As in a kind of breathless dream the figures, the central figures of the primeval man and woman, stripped of all shams and conventions, expand and seem to fill the heavens. There is too, an ease and certainty about the grouping of the lesser figures, no touch is missed, no stroke of insight wanting, nothing irrelevant, all superfluity burned away. Tom Lingard, King Tom, "the man ready for the obvious, no matter how startling, how terrible or menacing, yet defenceless as a child before the shadowy impulses of his own heart," is committed to a romantic enterprise involving the conquest of an Arab kingdom and its restoration to his friend Hassim. The work of years is complete, the final touch is about to be put to the enterprise when Mr. and Mrs. Travers and their friend, d'Alcacer, are stranded in their yacht at the very mudbank which guards the entrance to the scene of Lingard's enterprise. His impulse is to sacrifice the yacht and its inmates to his friends, Hassim and Immada. Then the disruptive influence of a passion for Mrs. Travers that sweeps him like a tropical storm forces him to destroy his life's work, to sacrifice his word pledged to his friends, in order to rescue Mrs. Travers and her husband from their situation. The plot is simple enough, but its execution, its classical severity and grandeur of outline, the perfect blending of sky, sea, sandbank, loneliness, terror, despair, into a tragedy that leaves one at the close, 'all calm and passion-spent,' these things can only be felt, they cannot be duly said.

S. H. H.