Customer Reviews

An Outcast of the Islands

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS was both Conrad's second novel and the second novel in a trilogy of books featuring Almayer (the first book being ALMAYER'S FOLLY and the third Conrad's final novel, THE RESCUE), who is a major minor character in this one after being the major character in his first novel. This novel is not as strong an effort as the novels from his major phase, but it is nonetheless a book of great power and wonderfully illustrates most of the great themes that run through all of his books. I have a love-hate relationship with Conrad, because while I respond to the marvelously depicted male characters in his books (his women are usually implausibly stupid and cardboardish) and their conflicts with the universe and each other, I find the world he describes as being a little too bleak and the cosmos far too impersonal. All of his characters are doomed to ineffecual action, and their fates are determined by forces and factors outside of themselves, or perhaps to some degree by motives within themselves over which they have no power. I do not like Conrad's universe, but I admit the power of his creation.

This is not one of Conrad's greatest works. It belongs in a tier immediately below his very greatest works like NOSTROMO, THE SECRET AGENT, UNDER WESTERN EYES, HEART OF DARKNESS, LORD JIM, and VICTORY. Nonetheless, slightly lesser Conrad is more rewarding than major works of other writers, and I heartily recommend this novel (as well as his other books) to any serious reader.

"I know the white man...in many lands have I seen them, always the slaves of their desires..."
This is Conrads second book and like his first it deals with the colonial enterprise but in this book white men are their own worst enemies. The native Malay characters are given more in the way of identity in this book and they are seen as having complex views. There is intrigue in this book as white men from different nations try to assert their dominance in the region but the Malays too have a plan and that is to take advantage of the whites aggressive and competitive natures and set them against each other. Great plot. But Conrad also gives you each characters story and each character is always more interesting than whatever role they are playing in the overall plot. One of the most attractive and elaborated themes in this book is the one of mans place in nature and mans own nature. The beauty of the tropical locale is made even more attractive and alluring by the women who walk through the foliage like "apparitions" veiled in "sunlight and shadow". Conrad describes the forests, the light in the tree tops, and the shadows on the forest floor and all nature is seen as metaphor for mans own dualities and incongruites. A much matured writer from Almayers Folly. The plot is simpler than Almayer was but thats good. The simpler plot allows Conrad more latitude to deal with the individual characteristics and that is certainly one of Conrads strengths. He sometimes overdoes it with the repeated use of words like inscrutable and the always heavy darkness, and his overall view of man seems dim, as man in his eyes is an only partially lit(enlightened) being. To Conrad man remains a lost creature for the most part who just by chance or luck or ill omen gets caught up in events he cannot fully comprehend. A limited resource man may be but while reading it is hard not to see it his way. The summing up scene at the end of the book with a drunken Almayer(who also appeared in Conrads first book, the Almayer of Almayers Folly) relating the now long passed events of the book to a traveling and equally drunk botanist is an excellent closing comment on the continued folly that is the colonial enterprise and man in general.

Conrad has a exciting style of writing which consists of artfully mixed poetic prose and moral analysis. The language of the text alone is enough to make this a great novel, perhaps even an epic poem. The intensity of the prose is such that I was driven backwards into my seat for most of the novel. A prequel to _Almayer's Folly_, An Outcast...is a true must read.

There's something almost pathological about the style and plotting of Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands. Reading it, one has the sense not of an artist explicating an idea, but of a man picking obsessively at a festering wound. "His story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences," H.G. Wells wrote of the book upon its release, and it's a fair judgment. The atmosphere of Outcast isn't merely built; it seeps from its author as if he were an emanating god in some theosophical or Qabbalistic cosmogony. In Conrad's universe, nature itself seems complicit in the downfall of men, and the weight of it is almost stifling at times for a reader.

Writing in 1896, Wells also regarded Outcast as "the finest piece of fiction published this year." That judgment is more problematic. Outcast was Conrad's second novel and would also be the second in his Malay trilogy. Typical of Conrad and his uniqueness as an author, Outcast moves backwards rather than forwards in time from the story of his first book, Almayer's Folly, and shifts the primary perspective away from Almayer, a trader in a remote Malayan outpost, to his boss Lingard and the outcast of the title, a clerk named Willems. While evidence can be found throughout the book of Conrad's facility as a stylist--its opening sentences alone signal that Conrad is an author to be reckoned with--it also suffers from limited characterization and what one critic, Tim Middleton (Joseph Conrad: Routledge Guides to Literature), has rightly called an "overwrought" and "hackneyed" plot.

"The doomed man" is a character that Conrad writes as well as probably anyone in literature, but the shaft that must be mined in order to reach that level of insight is too deep and dark to allow for much light to be cast on the nature of other characters. To criticize Conrad for two-dimensional characterization of women or indigenes is banal at this point, but nonetheless necessary; it limits Outcast's effectiveness and adds to the impression that, at its worst, the book is essentially nihilistic melodrama, if there could be such a thing. As Ross Slotten writes in The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, "Conrad himself had traveled through the East Indies between 1881 and 1889 but did not learn Malay and was unable to firmly grasp the Malay or Papuan character." That human and linguistic shortcoming stands in stark contrast to the anthropological interest displayed by Wallace, whose The Malay Archipelago influenced Conrad and was regarded by him as a "favorite bedside companion."

One final thing: the 1966 Airmont edition of An Outcast of the Islands has very small and crowded type, so if you're looking for a used copy, stick with Oxford.

Much -- perhaps too much -- has been written and said about Conrad's racism and/or racialism. By the second term, I mean the predilection of Conrad's contemporaries to explain culture and character by innate racial differences. In that sense, 'race' is one of Conrad's central themes, especially in The Outcast of the Islands, and Conrad is a bona fide quasi-Darwinist believer in racial determinism. Most of Conrad's 'South Sea' adventure novels are built around the clash of races. Again and again, both whites and non-whites devolve, degenerate, dissipate in reaction to each other. One might even say that Conrad is hugely antagonistic to and cynical about the white race in its colonial phase. Three of the white characters in Outcast - Hudig, Almayer, and Willems - mate with non-white women and father half-white children, and in every case the outcome is disastrous for all concerned. The contemptuous language that white characters spout about non-whites in Conrad's novels has earned him hostility from modern non-white readers, but wait! the non-whites in Conrad's novels are just as vituperative and derogatory about whites. Does Conrad take sides? It seems to me that he treats both sides rather harshly. Does Conrad really 'understand' his non-white characters? Now that's a good question, which I'm not anthropologist enough to answer. But it's clear that Conrad is pessimistic about the colonial encounter and the globalization of economic interests, that he perceives only obsessive, blind conflict leading to destruction for both sides. At this point in history, I wouldn't dare fault him as a prophet.

Conrad is also a writer of his times in his consistent portrayal of Nature as powerfully indifferent to humankind's fate, animate yet without animus, a constant beautiful perilous prolific Nature that will outlast humanity, that implicitly mocks humanity's piddling drama and self-importance. Such was the portrayal of nature by Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy, Jack London and other contemporaries of Conrad. The chief difference is in how gorgeously Conrad describes Nature, how well he treads the line between the emotional perceptions of Nature as "meaningful" for his characters and his own aloof awareness of Nature's unconcern.

Outcast is, briefly, a love story, then a hate story. Sexual energies are seldom beneficent in Conrad, and his women characters are no doubt his weakest. As a previous reviewer, Herr Schneider, aptly points out, the woman Aissa in Outcast is utterly implausible if you stop to analyze her expressions. By the time she begins to have a voice, however, any reader like me will be so caught up in the rip-roaring emotional and physical violence of this novel that he/she will suspend all doubts quite willingly.

The Outcast was Conrad's second novel, but curiously it has more syntactical tangles than Almayer's Folly, his first. One does have to wonder whether editors or colleagues played a role in Conrad's phenomenal command of his third language. Outcast seems to me to start very well, then drift for a few chapters, but then to build in tension and in verbal virtuosity along a parabolic curve of excitement. I swear, I read the 55 pages of the final Part Five without taking a breath.

So, yes, of course, I've read all the standard critics' and academics' judgement of this novel, meticulously recounted by many of the other reviewers here, that this second novel of Conrad's lacks the nuance or contains too much raw energy or something or other to count amongst Conrad's "top tier" of "mature" novels. Put simply, I profoundly disagree.

It IS quite a different sort of book than the other novels, so much so that it rather overwhelms the reader. Indeed, it reads much more like a necromantic outpouring of lyrical genius than like any sort of novel at all. In other words, it is a poem, a dark, lush, bleak, anguished poem, a cri de coeur from an abyssal universe told in such a rich, enchanting language that the reader is left - quite literally in my case - stunned at its power.

The description of the sea herein equally applies to the book itself:

"...glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love; a thing to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed. But its cruelty was redeemed by the charm of its inscrutable mystery, by the immensity of its promise, by the supreme witchery of its possible favour."

Our outcast, Willems, is not so much terrified by death but by life in this world, "the horror of bewildering life where he could understand and comprehend nobody round him; where he could guide, control, comprehend nothing and no one - not even himself."

I think the problem most readers have with the book if they are honest with themselves, and quite a few of the reviewers here are so, is that they are simply unable to stomach a vision so unremittingly bleak, regardless of its linguistic magic and puissance.

The novel is for the few and the brave, so to speak, for those unafraid to be lured into a world where he/she is forced to confront, "...the tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting; of the indestructible loneliness that surrounds, envelops, clothes every human soul from the cradle to the grave, and, perhaps, beyond."

Embark upon this book only if you dare!

As has often been noted, this novel was written before Conrad's period of greatness. Perhaps it doesn't measure up in psychological depth to such books as "The Secret Sharer", "Heart of Darkness", "The Secret Agent" or "Lord Jim", but written by anyone else, it would elevate them into the ranks of Great Literature. A scandal leads to the dismissal of a trusted agent for a Dutch trader in what is now Indonesia. His Eurasian wife, with whom relations have never been close, rejects him; he has to leave town. Looking for revenge for what he feels is an unfair dismissal, Willems, the former agent, plans to reveal a trade secret to an Arab rival. This, in the 19th century, was more than a business doublecross, it was a betrayal of "the blood". Colonialism was always about race and blood, so modern readers should understand that this is a subtext of the book. Various Malay pirates and rogues get involved. Almayer, a Dutch buyer stationed up a remote jungle river,(who appears in other Conrad novels) develops an unmitigated hatred of Willems. I should not reveal the denouement here, but believe me, it is melodramatic enough. Lots of jungle and thunderstorm atmosphere, Nature looms omnipotent in the background, not under threat from Man as in most of today's discourse.

Motivations in some cases remain a bit murky and sudden jumps in time help the author avoid explaining what might have transpired. Still, Willems, the eventual outcast, fallen from grace with his employers, become an object of scorn to his fellow Europeans in the town (probably Makassar, now Ujung Pandang in Sulawesi), is a conflicted character worthy of Conrad's other novels. Capt. Lingard, his old benefactor, is too much a super-hero, a character way too big for his boots. He tries to help his former protegée, but eventually abandons him to his fate. Aissa, Willems' Malay lover, resembles the Dragon Lady a bit too much to be true-to-life, while the other Malay characters too seemed to be comic book or cardboard cut-out figures most of the time. The distraught Eurasian wife, weak and vacillating, is rather outré. It's a good story, reflecting some of the historical patterns of the East Indies of that time. British and Dutch rivalry lasted for a long time. Arabs from the Hadramawt (now Yemen) emigrated to various European-dominated South East Asian societies and prospered mightily as middlemen and traders (see Engseng Ho's "Graves of Tarim", a historico-anthropological work). The rich Sayid Abdulla, plotting to take over the European trade network, is not an odd figure then. All in all, Conrad was impressive right from the start. This novel will definitely hold your attention. Couldn't give it less than four stars.

I love any book by Joseph Conrad and am on my way to reading just about everything he wrote. My next goal is to re-read it all again.

However, Outcast of the Island is not a "GREAT" book or piece of literature. It is interesting and worth reading especially if you like Conrad. I see it as a colonial/romance novel critical of the "British Empire" and of a man caught in the empire trade game who is led by his own devices to survive in his own game.

I like the descriptions of the exotic location, the dangerous love interest, and everything that is Conrad in style.

His writing style is too generous in his early work. He could be more sparse (needs to put his language on a stairmaster and lean it down). Anyway, I don't want to be against the book. If you are actually thinking about it, then get it and read it. It's not long and is fairly entertaining.

Bottome-line: First time Conrad readers go get a collection of his short stories. Everybody else-- sure why not.