The Inheritors By Joseph Conrad : From the author of Books like - Heart of Darkness - Lord Jim - Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction - The Secret Agent - Nostromo - Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

Book excerpt: From the author of Books like - Heart of Darkness - Lord Jim - Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction - The Secret Agent - Nostromo - Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer - Heart of Darkness and Other Tales - The Shadow-Line - The Secret Sharer - Victory - Tales Of Hearsay - Under Western Eyes - The Arrow Of Gold - The Inheritors - Tales Of Unrest About the Book: The Inheritors was the first collaboration between Conrad and Ford. They were introduced by Edward Garnett. The initial collaboration was to be on Ford’s unpublishable novel Seraphina but other projects kept them from it. Finally, they collaborated on this novel. Ford wrote most of it, with Conrad doing the editing. Conrad did not think very highly of it – I set myself to look upon the thing as a sort of skit upon the political (?!) novel. Unlike much of Conrad’s writing but like much of Ford’s it seems somewhat unfocussed, skipping about, rather than concentrating on a specific plot. It starts off with a long dialogue – Conrad would customarily start off by setting the scene or by introducing the characters. We do not know who the two characters are – one is a woman of indeterminate origin and another the narrator – an author. The narrator goes on to the house of Callan, a great novelist, where he is engaged to write a kind of series of studies of celebrities chez eux for Fox, who runs a journal“. The woman, of course, turns up at Callan’s house – her name is the improbable Miss Etchingham Granger – and she pretends to be the sister of our narrator (also called Etchingham Granger). She, like other characters, is a Fourth Dimensionist, the young trendies Ford is eager to attack. Her portrait is far from flattering and is a clear indication of the misogyny of both Ford and Conrad. We start to get in a complicated and not very convincing plot, involving Gurnard, the”coming man” in politics, a foreign financier called Duc de Mersch and Greenland (the country). Our hero – a political naïve, like both Ford and Conrad – somehow gets involved in this plot. Political and financial corruption in high places are attacked by Ford and Conrad, using only thinly disguised characters. Gurnard is clearly Joseph Chamberlain, his political companion, Churchill, is not Churchill but Balfour, while Fox is Lord Northcliffe and the Duc de Mersch Leopold II of Belgium. The influence of Conrad can be seen in the attack on Leopold for the atrocities in the Congo. Frankly, the plot is uninteresting as neither author knows much about either politics or finance, none of the characters is particularly sympathetic and, by the time, we get to the end, we really do not care for the fate of Churchill, Fox, Gurnard and Co. Both men would write far better novels About the Author: Joseph Conrad, original name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (born December 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]—died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England), English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story “Heart of Darkness” (1902). During his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. But his initial reputation as a masterful teller of colourful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual ...(100 of 2481 words). Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature.