Western Eyes

Finished Conrad's Under Western Eyes just now, having read most of the final section on the bus up to Melaka, and most of the rest in the last days of my June vacation in KL. It wasn't actually on my reading list for the holiday but I completed the other stuff I brought up from Singapore (of which more later) and picked up my old Pan paperback from the shelves of Maison KL realising I didn't think I'd ever really got into the novel after the brilliant first section set in Russia and it wouldn't do any harm to see if this time I could. And I did.

That first section is like something out of Dostoyevsky, consciously so on Conrad's part, though I don't think he thought all that much of Dostoyevsky as a guide to life. When I first read it I was deeply into the second greatest Russian novelist - to the point that I thought him the greatest - which is something that should be the case for all literary-minded teenagers. (I suppose it's the intensity of it all that does it - like Dickens on amphetamines.) So, of course, the Dostoyevskian Conrad had me hooked. But then comes the Conradian Conrad, and this is a kind of criticism of Dostoevsky - distant, cool, ironic, sceptical - and I suppose I just didn't have the temperament for it then. Why the distancing narrative that makes us view Razumov from the outside rather than treating us directly to his tortured consciousness? Why the clear-eyed, jaundiced view of those loopy 'revolutionists'? In fact, why the jaundiced view of everyone and everything, except perhaps Miss Haldin (and that's a big perhaps)? Now I think I get it, I suppose because I share that jaundice.

In these troubled times Conrad is an amazingly prescient guide regarding fanaticism of all stripes. Reading Under Western Eyes today you get an extraordinary sense of how right Conrad was about early twentieth century Russia. Note to self: must find time to reread The Secret Agent soon.