There will likely be spoilers in the review below, so take this as fair warning. If you haven’t read the book and think you may one day, it might be best to not read this review. On the other hand, this novel is almost 100 years old so I think it’s fair to speak of it with spoilers.
Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue has the subtitle A Romance of the Shallows and it is indeed a romance. Stated more accurately, and certainly in keeping with all the short stories and novels he wrote during his life, it is a tragic romance.
There is a joke of sorts that tells of someone writing a story and when asked how the story ends, he or she answers, “Everybody dies.” That’s a bit how The Rescue reads except everybody doesn’t die, just the native people—very much in keeping with the Conrad world.
The novel took twenty years to complete. He started it in the late 1890’s. He set it aside in 1898 to work on other projects and didn’t complete it until 1918. It was first published in 1920.
The Rescue is also part of a trilogy referred to as The Lingard Trilogy, three books that centre around the character of Tom Lingard. The other two books are Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896)—Conrad’s first two novels. Had he completed The Rescue without interruption, it would have been his third book, making his first three novels the trilogy.
The Story
The Wikipedia entry for The Rescue provides an accurate summary:
“The story follows Captain Tom Lingard, the recurring protagonist of The Lingard Trilogy, who was on his way to help a native friend regain his land when he falls in love with a married woman whose yacht he saves from foundering.”
Of course, in a story that is over 130,000 words there is a great deal more to it.
What the summary neglects to say is that Lingard is upset when he sees the yacht because it is where it should not be, the Shore of Refuge (in the Malay Archipelago). Its presence disrupts his plans, which he feels honour bound to carry out for his friend, Rajah Hassim.
Lingard’s initial response to the yacht’s presence is anger, and he distinctly feels inclined to leave the passengers stranded where they are because Lingard has no business with them, they are in the way, and they are frivolous people who have stumbled into a very serious situation—let them face the consequences.
But he cannot. His sense of honour and duty won’t allow him to. He will rescue them, he decides, by bringing them aboard his ship until the business he is there for is concluded, then he will take them back to the yacht and get them off the shoals so they can continue.
It is all very clear and simple in his mind. Unfortunately, the people on the yacht have different ideas and this is where Lingard’s plans begin to fall apart.
Exposition
Conrad is the most oblique of writers. He simply cannot state something directly. This is in some ways a strength and in others a weakness. It is a strength in that it often compels you forward, not unlike a mystery, as you seek the revelation and a full understanding of what has happened and is happening.
It’s a weakness in that it makes everything murky, often frustratingly so—particularly in the early parts of one of his novels. This is especially true in The Rescue. You often want to scream at his Captain Lingard, “For heaven’s sake, say it plainly!” Lingard continually speaks around his meaning; he never says it straight out.
There are a lot of elements and characters in The Rescue and as is often the case with Conrad, much of the novel—again, especially the early part—is exposition. He is painstakingly detailed as he describes the land, the trees, the sea, the shoals, the ships, and the characters, of which there are many. It becomes confusing, at least it did for me. I probably had half the book read before I really got a sense of where I was and who all the characters were.
In terms of structure, it is a very complex book. It begins with a brief prologue (not identified as such) of four paragraphs that very broadly describe the inexorable expansion of progress and its effects in the archipelago where the story is set.
Conrad’s view comes across as a conflicted one as he sees, and in a way he mourns, what is lost—the culture, the people—while at the same time feeling it is for the better, despite the cost. The story that follows is one that has at its heart the collision of the expanding west with the cultures it encounters, in this case Indonesian/Malaysian, making it essentially about colonialism. When it ends, you can’t help but feel Conrad’s sympathies are with the native peoples, not with the expanding west.
Type of Story
In one sense, The Rescue is a deceitful story. On the surface, it is an adventure, which is what many of Conrad’s stories were. But it is an adventure of the sea that has a romance woven into it, and fueling its plot: the relationship between Lingard and Mrs. Travers (Edith).
So it is a romance within an adventure. But it is also a reflection on the shoddy business of colonialism and its impact. In that sense, the story is an obfuscated one: It is three kinds of story at once, all interconnected and informing one another.
Mixed together as one, they become a story reflecting Conrad’s bleak view of innocence lost as progress pushes forward. Men like Lingard (or Heyst, in Victory) try to find little corners of the world where they can hide from it and elude its reach, but those efforts are doomed. The world always finds you and efforts to evade progress will fail.
Conrad may not have thought about colonialism the way we do now—he may not have used the word in our sense—but it’s essentially what he was writing about and what he wrote about was its destructiveness and, perhaps unintentionally, its vanity and greed.
September 21, 2016