Download The Rover fb2

Joseph Conrad was sixty-six years old, a few years younger than I am now, when 'The Rover' was first published in 1923. He must have been an 'old man' physically -- he died a year later -- with an old man's indifference to the profundities of his own earlier novels, since The Rover is a mellow historical Romance, a gently rolling tale of indomitable courage, sudden passion, and loyalty. The "Rover" of the story, Jean Peyrol, is an old man also, white-haired but still formidable, who is smitten by a Romance as quixotic and unfulfillable as that of any 12th C Provencal troubadour for his Lord's Lady. Et puis, violà, mes amis! My review title has a 'tres ingénieux' double meaning! Let's hear some applause.

Conrad always had a knack for portraying sturdy, resolute, 'heart-of-oak' old seamen, on the verge of their last 'voyage'. Jean Peyrol is an awesome specimen. A peasant orphan carried off to the Indian Ocean before the French Revolution, an adventurer-pirate who eventually took stock of his life and became a 'regular' sailor in the French navy, Peyrol returns to Toulon just after the Reign of Terror. His native France is, to him, the most foreign of lands, but nonetheless he decides to take haven there, to root himself in peaceful retirement. By an unforeseeable chance, he finds himself lodging in the farm/inn of a woman-of-allure, Arlette -- beautiful, unfathomable, half-mad, the victim of the insanity of the betrayed Revolution. Most of the story is narrated in the conventional omniscient third-person from over the broad shoulders of Peyrol, a man of implacable self-control. The fictive realization of Peyrol's character is among Conrad's best; the old man is magnificent yet believable.

As "fate" would have it -- and "fate" is a theme of this novel -- eight years later, Napoleon has further betrayed the ideals of the Revolution and the denouement is approaching at Trafalgar. Toulon and its coastline are under embargo, sealed by the British fleet. A young French officer arrives at Peyrol's sequestered cove, with a cunning plan that could change the course of events... and that's enough of the plot, mes amis! Suffice it to say that mighty passions are excited.

The Ideals of the French Revolution are also a theme of this novel. Patriotism is not a despicable passion here, but the passions aroused in revolutionary times are fatally corruptible. Conrad's 'revolutionary' themes have gotten less attention than his depictions of moral ambiguity; "Lord Jim" is more widely read than "Nostromo". But "The Rover" isn't as shallow a romance as it might seem on quick reading. It reiterates the subtle skepticism toward 'revolution' that Conrad expressed in "Nostromo" and "Under Western Eyes."

The question has been asked, why "The Rover" has not been acclaimed by critics and scholars as properly worthy of their attentions. It is something of a forgotten book. This edition is from a series of 'nautical adventure' novels; otherwise "The Rover" would be out-of-print. Some association with the Hornblower and Aubrey/Maturin novels of sailing ships in the Napoleonic War era is inevitable. Several reasons for the neglect come to mind. First, the book isn't structurally complex enough to require exegesis by graduate students; after wrestling with the ambiguities of "Heart of Darkness", no magisterial professor will find enough sustaining obscurity in it. Second, it's 'French' in sympathies, and English readers have scant tolerance for granting any sympathy to the French side in the Napoleonic Wars. When Peyrol extols the leadership of Bonaparte, when he asserts that such leadership is a fated necessity of history, Anglophone readers will shudder. The historical necessity of the French Revolution -- sullied by bloodthirstiness, betrayed by greed and opportunism, inevitably so -- is nonetheless sanctified over the long haul. It had to be. It was 'fated' to be, in the sense that effects are always fated by causes. But in 21st Century America and England, the merest suggestion that the French Revolution wasn't a hideous crime from start to finish is unwelcome. Burke rules, though very few people have read his sluggish prose, and Paine is ignored. To some degree, I think Conrad's final novel has been depreciated simply because its 'heroes' are French citoyens, not British shopkeepers.

But you needn't fret too much about interpretation when you read "The Rover". Chances are you'll never need to write a paper about it for any class. Read it just for fun! That's what I did, after reading four or five painful, somber novels of mid-20th C catastrophe. Possibly that's what Conrad had in mind: a thrilling escape from modern times.

Had this novel been written by Graham Greene (which is not an absurd notion, given that one of its themes is the suppression of the Catholic Church during the revolution), he would have called it an `entertainment'. Conrad does something else; he puts the following poem on the front page:

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.
(Spenser)

This was Conrad's last finished novel. Was he tired? The poem became his epitaph, not much later.

The Rover is a great and simple story, simply told, for a Conrad. There is no complicated narrative structure, not as much jumping in time as in many earlier works. Mostly we have the anonymous 3rd party narrator who can look into his protagonists' minds and who knows all about them.
Most of the time he follows Peyrol, our hero, the rover, a retiring seaman who returns home in the South of France after decades in the Far East, where he was mostly involved in piratical exploits, recently legitimized by the laws of war. It is revolution time in France when he returns, taking a prize, captured from the English in the Indian Ocean, into Toulon.
From Toulon he travels a short distance to his home region, which he has left as an orphaned little boy. He is wealthy and suspect: is he an aristocrat? A disguised clergyman? A foreigner, maybe a spy? The worst time of the terror is over by now.
He has stolen a treasure, which he conceals and carries around with him on his travel. He finds a place where he settles down, in a seaside farm cum guesthouse occupied by two women and a former `blood drinker', a fervent revolutionary. The women are the patronne, who is a seemingly half mad young woman, and her aunt. We assume that the man has a claim on the patronne.

The narration then jumps 8 years. It is Napoleon's time now. Former sans-culottes are unhappy.
Peyrol, the rover, is still in the same guesthouse. The English are back in the Mediterranean, sea warfare is on. (We know all about that from Patrick O'Brian.)
Peyrol is getting dragged into the war. Retirement is suspended.
Nelson has begun a loose blockade of Toulon by sea, trying to lure the French out for battle.
English spy ships are hugging the shore.
The rover gets involved with an attempt at deceiving Nelson.
He owns a little sailing boat by now.
(During his restoration work of his boat, he befriends a cripple, who has this remarkable comment to offer: Since those Republicans have deposed God and flung Him out of all the churches I have forgiven Him all my troubles. Spoken like a man, says Peyrol. This is one of the most religious scenes in all of unreligious Conrad.)
The war story gets a little complicated by a love story, as one would expect. The patronne has her eyes on a French navy lieutenant. This aspect of the plot is not so great. Conrad's women were not his strong side.
Structurally I would have wished more sea action. Anyway, it is a proper precursor for Jack Aubrey's Mediterranean adventures.

The novel is one of Conrad's most enjoyable ones, though it lacks the psychological depth of his main period. I am not sure why it does not receive more recognition. (Why is there no proper current edition, e.g. in Penguin?) It was made into a film with Anthony Quinn, which strikes me as good casting, though I have not watched it. However the plot of the film has done violence to the novel, which is a repellant for me.

I would not have know of this book had I not seen the reference in the Afterward of Dewey Lambdin's book, "H.M.S. Cockerel," which dealt with the British evacuation of Toulon in late 1793. The book was originally published in 1923, and just reissued in 1999. It was the last novel completed by Joseph Conrad. It is the tale of the sailor, Peyrol, but also of poor, mad Arlette, her parents murdered in the massacre in Toulon after the British evacuation, who roams silently about, her shifting eyes forever seeking someone. The story starts in late 1796, after the temporary British evacuation of the Mediterranean, with Peyrol's arrival in Toulon in command of a prize ship. After setting the stage for the story, events jump forward to the 1803-1805 time period when Admiral Lord Nelson was in command of a fleet blockading the port. The story has a tendency to shift from scene to scene, with some flashbacks in time that sometimes make it a little difficult to follow the sequence of events, but overall it is well written and a very good tale. It is a shift from the usual naval adventure, but fills in a part of the events taking place in that time period.

Very Good