Customer Reviews

Chance

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
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From the author famous for seminal works like The Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and Nostromo this novel is often left unmentioned within his repertoire of books. This is unfair. I would say Chance is Conrad's most beautiful story, the construction of the plot masterly from start to conclusion, and probably the only novel of his which genuinely leaves a good feeling and makes the reader smile. His handling of the material from Marlow the teller of the tale, the way the novels flits from present to the past and back again flawlessly, surprises one how so far ahead Conrad was compared to the standard straight-line story telling that dominated writing of that era. But bottomline is despite the technical perfection, a story would only succeed its telling if it has heart. Here Conrad never faltered and one feels for the heroine in the story, and it would be hard not to let out a whoop of bemused joy once the final page is turned. Simply sublime.

I cannot believe that there are no customer reviews already for this spectacular novel - full of intruiging situations and wonderful characters - certainly the best Conrad female character I have read. Conrad is a wonderful writer in style and the manner in which he tells a yarn - how then has this novel become so 'lost'? It has wonderful lines ('Don't be in a hurry to thank me,' says he. 'The voyage isn't finished yet.' p22 Oxford World Classics), great insights (women respond to the smallest things, which immediately had me nodding in agreement from my own experience), spectacular descriptions ('Yes, I gave up the walk [along a cliff top with the intention of killing herself],' she said slowly before raising her downcast eyes. When she did so it was with an extraordinary effect. It was like catching sight of a piece of clear blue sky, of a stretch of open water. And for a moment I understood the desire of that man to whom the sea ans sky of his solitary life had appeared suddenly incomplete without that glance which seemed to belong to both of them. p231). The characters are admirable in behaviour sometimes, victims sometimes, regrettable in behaviour sometimes, or just plain confused - just like real people. But one thing I really like is the way the narrator of the story is an observer, barely a participant of the events being described.

This may not be the perfect novel, but I urge you not to miss it. The chapter 'On the Pavement' by itself is worth the read!

This book is just perfect. It's very well written. Conrad shows an understanding of the predicament of women of his time. Conrad advances the plot though the voice of the characters, who tell a story, which involves another character telling a story, etc. At one point the tale is six levels deep; but such is the skill of Conrad that you do not notice and are never lost. One of Conrad's two or three best. A book I was sad to end because I was enjoying it so much.

Chance is a wonderful Conrad novel that no one really pays attention to nowadays. True, it does not have the same magic as Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness, but it is brilliant in that Conradian way. It features the return of Marlow, so it is an especially interesting read for Conrad fans who have been with Marlow through other novels and stories. His role in this book is less hands-on. He does not have a very strong tie to the two characters he most discusses. He does, however, have a more active role in the actual narration. His audience this time is not passive, but questions his analyses and puts in their own ideas. A hilarious example:
"You are the expert in the psychological wilderness. This is like one of those Redskin stories where the noble savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his incomparable knowledge follows the track and reads the signs of her fate in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinklet dropped by the way."

For those unfamiliar with Marlow, the commentator is refering to his capacity for putting together pieces of information to create a sketch of a person, and we have to filter through some of Marlow's pretensions to get a real view of what is going on in his story. At one point, he compares women to electricity. Both have been captured, "but what sort of conquest would you call it? (Man) knows nothing of it. And the greater the demand he makes on it in the exultation of his pride the more likely it is to turn on him and burn him to a cinder." Ah, Marlow, you rambling fool.

This is the novel that brought Conrad popular success, rather late in his career. It is one of his only female characters with a dominant role, but don't expect a strong feminist type. Flora de Barral is naive, at the mercy of others and their wills. I didn't feel quite as close to the characters, and Conrad tries a little too hard to philosophize on the role of chance and circumstance in our lives. Still, very enjoyable, witty, pure Conrad that you shouldn't miss.

My first Conrad read was Victory, and I have been hooked ever since. I chose Chance because it was Conrad's first commercial success, and I was curious to see what the public liked better than so many other great novels such as Lord Jim. As other reviewers have suggested, the ending must have been the difference. There is far more sweet than bitter, and it's usually the other way around in his books, especially the love stories. I suspect we may learn more from sad stories than from happy ones, but in any event, Chance is not without pain and suffering. As the capable narrator Marlowe repeatedly emphasizes, the novel's heroine, Flora, leads a difficult life. Her father is one of the great villans in literature. He really steals show from Marlowe--well, almost.

What I like most about Conrad's use of the narrator, particularly in Chance, is his role as an interpreter. In most novels, the reader must examine the story itself for the life lessons Conrad so uniquely presents. Marlowe enables Conrad to speak more directly to the reader, and I found him doing so more in Chance than in Lord Jim. There are a few arguably gratutious digressions--one about the differences between men and women comes to mind--but that's Marlowe.

The bottom line: if in reading Lord Jim, you really enjoyed Marlowe's character, you will love the extra depth and insight Chance provides. If you love Conrad, then I expect you will find this to be one his most enjoyable books. And, if you have never read Conrad, but are curious, this is an excellent novel to start with, for it cannot be sterotyped as a South Seas adventure novel full of Pacific atmosphere and nautical terms.

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.

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.'

A chance meeting with a Mr Powell leads Marlow to recollect his chance connections To the Feins-and Mrs Feins' brother Captain Anthony ; his chance meeting with Flora De Barrel,daughter of a disgraced financier,and their elopement on Anthonys ship.

Chance occurances and happenings connect lifes machinations according to Conrad, and this story unfolds gracefully on such chances ,with the proceedings kept in witty check by Marlows narration.

Conrad is the master of descriptive, meticulously detailed story telling and 'Chance' is no exception to this rule. Perhaps a little over long, and your sympathies wax and wane at times, but a great tale written in a style and manner few in the past-and possibly none today-could match and master,

Henry James didn't like Conrad's eighth novel, Chance. He criticized it as being "steeped in perfect eventual obscuration", with difficulties "wantonly evoked." I disagree completely. "Chance" seems to me one of Conrad's most deliberate novels, one in which he achieved narrative virtuosity, making the title subtly ironic since from a structural viewpoint nothing is left to `chance' and every twist of narration is superbly controlled. Curiously, the reading public in England and America may have felt the same admiration for this complex novel, since it became Conrad's first real `best seller.'

Henry James. Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, Ford Madox Ford, and Joseph Conrad. Are there any writers in English today who approach them in artistic `specific gravity'? That is, in the density of nuance and complexity of characterization, let alone the sheer scope of language? Could any of them even get published today, or have a career as a writer? The perspicacity of the reading public of their generation is not to be despised!

This novel is a tale retold by an unidentified narrator, of a tale told in several sessions by that consummate teller of tales, Marlow. But most of what Marlow tells is in turn second-hand retelling of what he has learned in explanation of events after the fact. Pay heed to the punctuation when you read this book; quotes within quotes within quotes abound. Yet this is anything but `wanton.' Much of Conrad's understanding of life can be perceived in his characters' need to act on information they don't yet have and to proceed through the passage of time without the foresight of a novelist with a plot outline in hand.

"High drama - suicide, swindles, elopement, love, murder - for a rousing good tale!" That's what the blurb on the dust-cover of my edition of Chance promises to the reader, and it's essentially true. But those crowd-pleasing elements could be written into a much less allusive, elusive pot-boiler by any old hack. Conrad, as usual, has written a novel that gets better the more you think about it, both while you read and after. "Chance" truly is the subject here, and I `think' that Conrad was struggling to redefine the meaning of chance, in fictional illustration, from the older concept of `luck' to a modern concept of `contingency' or accident. The older sense of chance represented something internal - intrinsic - to the individual. That's why coincidences and chance encounters seemed so plausible to Victorian novelists; such `chances' were bound to happen! The `chances' that occur in Conrad's novel certainly determine the course of events, but they are NOT bound to happen. It's not claiming too much to say that Conrad was one of the first novelists in English to write in the post-Darwin climate of scientific relativism, of atomistic, impersonal chance.

Long live Marlow! I'd give a gland to run across him in a hoary harbor tavern on the Thames, and to sit spellbound for an evening, listening to one of his wanton narrations!

It is paradoxical that Conrad's most successful work at the time of its publishing should also be the least satisfactory of his major works. Narrated largely by Conrad's alter ego Marlow it is the story of young Flora de Barral who is torn emotionally between her imprisoned financier father (who bears a strong resemblance to Trollope's Augustus Melmotte) and Captain Anthony, the respected brother of her Feminist guardian Mrs Fyne. Written during the suffragette era Conrad attempts to address directly the issue of feminism but the prejudices of the time (Victorian/Edwardian) and his origins (Polish) act as impediments to his impartiality. Though I feel that it is a judgment based on today's standards to describe Marlow's narrative as misogynistic, it does at times make uncomfortable reading: `...Mrs Fyne did not want women to be women. Her theory was that they should turn themselves into unscrupulous sexless nuisances'. As such it acts as unwitting historical testimony to male attitudes of Conrad's background at that time.

Ostensibly a tale of doomed love Chance is an overlong and confusing nested narrative that nevertheless is a four-star work because it is a fine story written in a beautiful, dignified English that has long since been abandoned for a prose that is dull and functional or pompous and overblown. If you are a Conrad fan like me and you wish to `complete the set' then it is an interesting diversion for that great author, though, not surprisingly, the best passages are on board The Ferndale. If you are new to Conrad then I don't recommend this as a starter. Instead go for any of his well-known works which are all readily available.