Staying Power

I started reading Joseph Conrad's Chance last November, but made little progress and considered myself as having abandoned the attempt by early January when I returned the text to the library. I had been okay with the first chapter, revolving around a narrative concerning one Charles Powell recalling getting a berth aboard a ship as its first mate in his youth, but couldn't get hold of the fact that the second chapter took off in a completely different direction, with Mr Powell being nowhere in sight. Indeed, I struggled to grasp any of the relations of the new characters to each other or to the narrator, Marlow, (with that narration itself being mediated by an unknown interlocuter with Marlow, prone to comment on Marlow as a character.)

However, I didn't care for the feeling of a text defeating me - something I was only too familiar with as a teenager - and decided a week ago to have another go at reading the novel. This time I managed to overcome the confusions of Chapter 2 and I've now made reasonable progress in the story, with the halfway point coming up soon.

This isn't vintage Conrad. It has nothing of the mesmeric power of the three novels immediately preceding it - Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes - but there's a degree of fascination in seeing Conrad place a female character, Flora de Barral, at the centre of his concerns. The problem is though that the indirectness of his approach to her in terms of narrative focus demands a good deal of patience from the reader.

But the really odd thing is that Chance was Conrad's first big success as a writer in terms of sales. In many ways it established his reputation as a major novelist. Presumably ordinary readers had a good deal more staying power back in the first decade of the twentieth century.