Customer Reviews

The Secret Sharer

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This is a great short story and I highly recommend it. This kindle edition has a few type-o's that you only notice if you are reading to savor every word, like I was, but other than that it is perfect. I agree with the other reviewer who said it is haunting; it is haunting in that it stays with you in an agreeable way. I finished it two days ago and am still happily turning it over in my mind.

I bought this book on my Kindle because it was free but I was astounded. I read it in my spare time over the course of a few days. Quick, easy read but enchanting and hauntinly moving.

This novel was recommended as one of the Harvard Business Review's top reads on leadership. After reading, I selected it as the primary text for a new leadership team. It sparked wonderful conversation and thought. Over a year later, the team still talks about "getting too close to the shore".

The Secret Sharer is part of Conrad's so-called Bangkok trilogy with stories set in Thailand and its waters.
The narrator is a young captain who was recently given his first command, taking a ship that he does not know, with a crew that he does not know, from Bangkok back to England. Only the 2nd mate is younger than the captain, and he is an unpleasant know-all, while the chief mate is a somewhat dumb older fellow. The whole population on board is skeptical about the new boss. That's what he thinks.

And then he has his first real crisis right after leaving Bangkok, having been tugged out of the river to the sea, where the ship lies at anquor, waiting for winds to take it to the South through the Gulf of Siam. A Liverpool steamer lies nearby, and at night a runaway from that ship comes to our hero: the former 2nd mate of the steamer has been under arrest for killing a sailor in a fight. He has escaped and looks for help. Inexplicably, our narrator decides to help, hiding the escapee in his cabin, which heightens the tension between him and his crew, since he needs to behave funny to avoid detection.

The 'secret sharer' is in every respect a 'double' of the captain: age, education, looks, attitudes. The captain decides to help him get away by keeping him on board and taking him to land further South. In order to do that he has to give ununderstandable instructions to his crew, who think he is crazy and will lose the ship.
Which he very nearly does. This is about sailing too close to land. A metaphor for many comparable situations when there are conflicting objectives.

"The Secret Sharer" is one of Conrad's final works of major short fiction and one of his best. However, since it is widely anthologized -- e.g., in Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction --, it is hard to justify buying a standalone. The story is certainly worth reading by itself, but one might as well get other excellent stories with it.

"The Secret" finds Conradreturning to the sea after a long absence and has much of the suspense and adventurous spirit of his early works. Indeed, it may well be his most suspenseful and conventionally entertaining work of all; its influence on later writers is easy to see. This is so much so that it can be enjoyed by nearly anyone on this surface level, but as always with Conrad, there is deep symbolic value. "The Secret" again dramatizes outsider status, though more subtly and ambiguously than prior works like "Amy." It also deals with other important themes, including the clash of rules and personal morality, authority vs. individualism, etc. Reading it alone has the virtue of leading one to more Conrad, but why not just get more along with it?

I read this for literature in a college class, and I loved it. It was a little difficult to start for me, but that might have been because of my hectic schedule. Other than that, it was an easy to read example of classic literature, and I highly recommend it!

A 1900ish sailing tale - a new untested captain falls into circumstances where he is harboring a stowaway - this is a great read on many levels . . . .

An interesting sailing tale from years gone by, it educates of ship's organization and operations. It is a study in leadership, the authority and the lonliness,the rewards and the risks. It is a study in "following", as in this story the crew thought the captain to be a fool, but they didn't know the whole body of the situation.

And it is a real study in "situational ethics": Was the captain breaking a law, either statutory or moral? Did he have a duty to aid this fugitive? Did he have the right? Was he out of bounds to risk his ship and crew for the marginal benefit of one man?

Great story, on many levels. As much as I hated Conrad's Heart of Darkness (which was obscure and confusing), I loved The Secret Sharer (which was thought-provoking and adequately deep, yet at the same time accessible and plainly told, even entertaining).