Customer Reviews

Victory (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)

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2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Victory presents a philosophical story of a man who learns that his own philosophy has robbed him of a life worth living. The novel is Conrad's answer to the prevailing view that only facts matter, that emotions such as love have no basis in reality.

The protagonist, Axel Heyst, is the son of a philosopher who once wrote, "Of the strategems of life, the most cruel is the consolation of love." His philosophy Conrad compares to a "terrible trumpet which had filled heaven and earth with ruins..."After his father dies, Heyst wanders the globe, looking "only for facts" until he becomes enchanted with a South Sea archipelago. Therafter, he is drawn to two people who provide models of friendship and love. Morrison, a small craft owner whose generosity has left him bankrupt, Heyst helps out of his bind only to fail to understand why the man is so grateful and anxious to repay him. But it is the girl Lena who fills him with an emotion that he cannot express or understand until the novel's end. After rescuing her from a life of exploitation, Heyst takes her back to his island where he is determined to live apart from the world.

It's only after his island is invaded by two criminals that Heyst discovers how much his actions toward Morrison and Lena were motivated by love. When he learns that the jealous hotelkeeper, Schomberg, has told everyone that "the Swede" had swindled his friend out of all his money before sending him to England to die, Heyst becomes upset, even though he had never cared what the world thought of him. When the malefactors Jones and Ricardo threaten Lena's life, he at last becomes involved in the world that he had left behind.

Suspenseful and chilling, Heyst's fight with the criminals ends with a victory having multiple meanings. Unlike with his other work, Conrad falls back on the plot device of coincidence to make a satisfactory ending, but the artifice only slightly mars a book that should be read as much for its message as for its story.

"Victory" is not so much a conventional novel as a fable, with strong influences of the Bible, Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Shakespeare's "The Tempest". This story is absolutely marginal, that is, it occurs to people who inhabit the margins of the world, the margins of society, and within the margins of a common life. The characters also operate in one or the other of the two extremes of morality. Axel Heyst, a Swede son of a bitter and disenchanted philosopher, is extremely influenced by the parental way of thinking, to the point that he follows the advice provided by his dying father. When Heyst, disconcerted at the foot of the bed, asks him what is the proper way to live, Heyst senior answers: "Look on, and make no sound". So, after his father dies, Axel emigrates to the colonies in Southeastern Asia, where he makes a living as a merchant, coming and going about the islands. Heyst is a distant but kind guy, always with a smile on his face and willing to help others, but always refusing any kind of intimacy. One day, he enters a business about a coal mine with an associate, the death of whom (not a murder) he is later accused of provoking, which gives him a reputation throughout the islands as a mysterious, somewhat mischievous man. His main detractor is a hotel keeper, one Schomberg, a hateful, coward, and calumnious man. After the business goes broke, Schomberg escalates his tirades about "that Swede", slowly developing an irrational hatred towards him. Meanwhile, unaware of his reputation and of Schomberg's hatred, Heyst decides to stay on the remote island where the coal mine used to be, totally isolated from humanity, except for the silent and shadowy company of his servant, Wang.

One day, on account of old business affairs, Heyst travels to the island where Schomberg's hotel is, and stays there. There he meets a young woman who plays in a "ladies orchestra", managed by a sinister couple who practically treats their employees as slaves. The girl, Lena, tells Heyst that the hideous Schomberg has been sexually harassing her, and begs him to get her out of there. Heyst, attracted by the beauty and mystery of the girl, manages to smuggle her out of the hotel and take her to his island. This, of course takes Schomberg's hatred to extremes. A little time later, three criminals arrive to the hotel. They force Schomberg to host illegal gambling, and make his life hell, practically taking over the place. As the secretary of the boss (one Mr. Jones), Martin Ricardo, reveals their past (true or imaginary, but certainly scary), Schomberg comes up with an idea. He tells them that Heyst keeps vast amounts of money on the island. Ricardo convinces his boss to go there and assault him. He hides from his boss the fact that there is a girl, for Mr. Jones has an irrational hatred and fear of women. Meanwhile, Heyst and Lena lead a loving, peaceful life. It's easy to see here the metaphor of Adam and Eve. One day, the three thugs arrive, almost dead, and Heyst rescues and shelters them, but with a gloomy feeling of something bad to come.

It would be foolish to reveal anything more. The rest is a hair-rising game of psychological chess, where suspense and tension are almost unbearable. The intruders in Paradise and the primeval Man and Woman struggle to achieve their ends, in sequences of undescribable beauty and sadness.

As I said at the beginning, this is more a fable than a common novel. I think it is wrong to do what another reviewer here, Bruce Kendall (otherwise an excellent one) did: to concentrate on novelistic technique. Yes, the narrator begins by being a casual follower of the story, and ends by being omniscient. Yes, some of Heyst's and Lena's dialogues are almost corny. Yes, the allusions to Paradise Lost are too obvious. But that's not the content nor the point. This is a powerful, moving, unforgettable tale of innocence violated, of pure evil against goodness, of the pain stupid and useless people can inflict on persons who are only minding their own business. It is also a cautionary tale about the perils of isolation. About the dangers incurred on by giving up on people, on love, on trust. At some point, Heyst wishes he had learned to hope and to fight as a young man. So many subjects, the quality of character development, so beautiful a literature (you will find passages and sentences that are real poetry), make for a great piece of art. Joseph Conrad grows in time as one of the quintessential writers of history.

Victory is the story of a man named Heyst who leads an isolated life in the South Pacific. However, he is drawn out of his isolation when he brings a woman to his island home. A chance encounter between a dishonest German who dislikes Heyst and two criminals sets up the dramatic ending. Conrad's style is as fluid as in his better known books, such as Lord Jim, and it is amazing that someone could write English so well who did not learn it until later in life and who always spoke it with a heavy Polish accent. Victory is similar to Conrad's other works in that the plot flirts with melodrama, but always is rooted in realism. Those who read the book will find the title apt.

'Apparently you were not near enough for me'. Is this the complaint of all men for women? The strange drawing together of the isolated man (so much as I once was) with the resourceful but unexpected woman so shocked the 'world', those who missed out, that evil had to come of it. But this novel is called 'Victory', Conrad saw it as upbeat. And it is in a strange sort of way. I was profoundly disappointed at the end, as indeed I am disappointed by the end of every life that is a part of my own.

Considering the nature of this novel - the strength and support of man (ineffective, but well meaning) for woman, and the wisdom and courage of woman (committed, but perhaps foolish) for man, the end is still inevitable. But Conrad manages to craft an ending that is a victory - one in which neither party compromises their view of the world despite the threats it imposes on them.
In Heyst - the 'hero' I saw much of myself. In Lena, the heroine who fails to succeed where success was impossible, I see a particular courageous woman in my own world. Perhaps you too will be able to find one?
There are wonderful characters in this novel, but I do regret the lack of any native Indonesian flavour to the story - place is well portrayed, peripheral people less so. But, perhaps in Conrad's time - colonial times - this is just the way the Europeans were - blind to the people around them, not seeing them as truly human.

Victory is in many ways more fluid and readable than Conrad's more dense works (for comparison sake I'd previously read Heart of Darkness and Conrad's collection of short stories Tales of Unrest.) In Victory we have Conrad's standard fare of tragedy and man's isolation, but in this case wrapped in a tale of adventure and swept along by an uncharacteristically eventful plot.

Conrad's works have, of course, been reviewed to exhaustion; the only thing that I could hope to add would be my emotional response to the novel as a reader.

Personally through the majority of the novel I found Heyst to be the only truly well defined character. Much of what we learn of him is revealed indirectly through the observations of others, but somehow Conrad manages to use this method to flesh out a complex and intriguing figure in Heyst. The remanding characters, while interesting, serve mostly as scenery. The villains Jones and Ricardo, while interesting, struck me not so much as human characters but as forces of impending doom; they could have as easily been an approaching storm or a plague or any other brand of natural disaster. The girl Lena in the end is the one exception; perhaps the one thing that I found most gratifying is the way in which her character developed as the novel neared its climax.

The Penguin Classics version is well footnoted for those of you (like me) that would have missed some of the more obscure Biblical references and allusions to Paradise Lost. The notes also comment on the narrator's shifting viewpoint, and on revisions Conrad made to subsequent editions. For those readers interested in an insight into Conrad's thinking I'd recommend this version.

Out of all that Conrad has ever written (and I have read nearly all that he has), Victory is my favorite of his works. The book is full of meaning and nuance. It is a love story, an examination of love itself, an adventure, a drama, an allegory, an examination of human nature, a look into the soul, and ultimately a truly heart-breaking tragedy.
The characters almost perfectly constructed and the story is driven by them. The main character, Axel Hyest, has to be one of Conrad's most complex heros. Lena, the female protagonist is a startling combination of innocence and power. A truly unique persona.
The settings are masterfully described, with typical Conrad depth. Perhaps only Nostromo is more full of vivid descriptions. Like all great books, you end up falling in love with the characters. I didn't want the story to end, and when it did I was in awe. Hands down, one of the greatest authors of all time.

This was Joe Conrad's favorite novel, and it's mine too. For a Victorian novel, it sure has a deep erotic undercurrent, with eerie near-sexual symbols, and delicious man-woman tension and man-man conflict-unto-death. Oh how you learn to love the vividly drawn characters, and oh how you care about what happens to them. Like a lot of Victorian novels, it's a book that can scare you. It has the magic hand of fate all through it. It's magic, majestic, magnificent - definitely Conrad's best.

Victory, pubished in 1915, tells the story of a loner, a victimized woman, a frustrated, jealous, vengeful man, his wife and the predators he uses to achieve the revenge he is too much of a coward to exact himself. Axel Heyst is a cynical loner, who, largely through the influence of his misanthropic father, is disillusioned with the world. He meets, Lena, a member of a woman's traveling orchestra, where she is harshly treated and from which she cannot escape. Schomberg, the owner of the hotel where the orchestra is employed makes advances towards her, which she repulses. Heyst, who is intensly disliked by Schomberg, takes pity on her and with the help of Schomberg's wife, escapes with her to the island of Samburan, now uninhabited (except for his servant Wang) where he had been owner of a the Tropical Belt Coal Company. Schomberg convices three men, who he fears and wants to get rid of, that Heyst has amased a large fortune just waiting to be taken from him. He describes how they can find this island. Despite Schomberg sabotageing their water supply they make it to the island, though barely alive. Although Heyst saves them, he distrusts them from the start and knows that he and Lena are in great danger. How this story plays out is facinating and frightening by turns, and as is usual with Conrad, there are great, indeed profound insights into the human soul, both the light and the very dark. How Heyst changes through his relationship with Lena from a man who can live without anyone to one who can't live without this one person is a major theme that is told with the rich psychological insight that made Conrad a master. As great as Nostromo, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkess all are, I enjoyed Victory even more. The writing is more direct, with less digression (which can be distracting)than in these other books. This results in the story moving along to the extent that you can't wait to find out how it will all end. This isn't one of those classics that are simply "good for you to read" it just plain Good!

Though I include Conrad in the league of "master novelists," Victory falls short of his best work.

One problem involves the work's narrative form. Conrad, who had proven in 1904 with Nostromo that he could minuplate narrative masterfully, performs some sleight-of-hand trickery here that tends to disconcert, rather than amaze the reader. On the one hand the narrator is a first-person, frivolous quidnunc, listening in on and reporting on conversations he overhears on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. At other times, he is an omniscient narrator, privy to all the private diologue and thought that take place on Samburan and elsewhere. Only once do we see him refer to himself as a character in the story, during a brief conversation he has with Davidson about Mrs. Schomberg. The same narrative technique is used by Dostoevsky in The Possessed, but I didn't find it as obtrusive there.

Aside from the narrative jumble, Conrad also fumbles with diologue here. Most of the diologue is between Heyst and Lena and is of so saccharine a variety, one half expects to hear MGM violins playing in the background. Purple, sentimental language is but one aspect of the melodramatic tone of the novel as a whole. The central plot, pitting the lover's happiness against Ricardo's and Jones' dastardly machinations is more characteristic of Victorian romance than Conrad at his best. Another of the shifts towards melodrama is exhibited in the work's one-dimensional charcters. Lena and Heyst clearly represent good. Ricardo and Jones clearly represent evil. Since Ricardo and Jones, and their ape-dog, Pedro, are so thinly dilineated, they appear comic, rather than operating as true dramatic foils to Heyst. Conrad attempts to counter the comic shallowness of his vilains by dressing them in Satan's clothing. The "Paradise Lost" motif is one of the most obvious in the book, yet, like most of Conrad's themes here, it leads nowhere, ultimately. Adam and Eve are represented by Lena and Heyst. Satan is a bit more ambiguous, only insofar as he is represented in composite by Jones and Ricardo.

The Genesis and Miltonic backdrop really picks up steam in part 111, when Heyst announces "There must be a lot of the original Adam in me after all." While representations of Lena as Eve are slightly more subtle, they are abundant nevertheless. The repeated image of Lena standing before Heyst with her hair cascading down over her white shoulders vividly recalls Milton's depictions of the "mother of mankind." Lest we have any doubts about it, Heyst tells Lena "You are different. Woman is the tempter."

Jones and Ricardo as a Satanic composite takes a slightly closer reading to get at: "Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint puff of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays on the dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the grave of the sun." One would have to have some familiarity with Milton and with the Old Testament to catch the Satanic reference here. In Isa. xiv, 12, the prophet refers to Venus as "Lucifer, son of the morning." Milton associates Satan with "the morning star" (PL V). More often than not, however, Conrad is not this subtle. Jones (Satan in rebellion) identifies himself as "He that is'" when talking to Heyst. This places Heyst in apposition to that other Supernatural Being who tells Moses "I am that I am." Elsewhere, Jones tells Heyst that he has been "ejected" from his proper sphere, "because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions...he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth." Ricardo, who represents Satan in activity, talks often of not having to crawl about on his belly anymore. When he attacks Lena, Conrad describes him as a serpent, with his arms pinned to his sides and his body sawying like a cobra's. Lest we should still be in the dark about Lena's Eve function, we learn (again from the omniscient narrator who can see into people's dreams)that Lena has had a dream of foreboding, which parallels Eve's precognitive dream in PL. As an even more convincing proof, we see Lena in a conquering pose, her foot above Ricardo's head, recalling The Angel's message in the final book of PL that Eve's descendent will vanquish Satan and hold his head underfoot.

All that said, Conrad, even when operating at less than peak capacity, is still a more interesting novelist than 99% of all others. But for those who want to read a perfectly-crafted, controlled and masterfully written novel, I would suggest they turn to Nostromo. Then come back to this book and read it for enjoyment, for it's still a good read, just not as fulfilling as literature.

Joseph Conrad is my favorite author, and I'm close to having read everything he's written. This is my favorite novel. I've read the criticism, that it's too sentimental, that its characters aren't as rich as in other Conrad tales...bumpkis. Consider Schomberg, consider Heyst...well, unless you've read the novel of course you can't. I encourage you to. I've read that it was Conrad's favorite, and one can understand why, in Heyst we get a glimpse into the soul of the aloof author, and in the memorable final word of the novel we get an impression of what he saw in the world. No other Conrad novel with the possible exception of Lord Jim has so personally affected me, and if like him, and like Heyst, you have sloughed off sentimentality, abandoned your Romantic side, then maybe this novel has something to teach you. I certainly learned something.