Book of the week
The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff William Collins 400pp £25
Joseph Conrad, the subject of this superb biography, led the most “improbable” life of any great novelist, said John Carey in The Sunday Times. He was born in 1857, the son of ardent Polish nationalists who were “exiled to a pestiferous swamp north of Moscow” by the tsarist police. Orphaned at 11, he became a sailor, and spent his late teens and 20s working mainly for the British merchant navy. In 1878, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest (the bullet missed his heart). Writing first occurred to him some years later, when he spotted a magazine advert requesting nautical yarns from sailors. “He decided to have a go, although writing in English, his third language after Polish and French, was a slog.” His first novel came out in 1895, and over the next decade or so Conrad (pictured) became a “pioneer of modernism”, producing such masterpieces as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and The Secret Agent. This account of his life by the Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff stands out for its “imaginative writing” and her “perceptive” readings of his work.
Charting Conrad’s life is no easy task, said Jerome Boyd Maunsell in the Financial Times. Before finally marrying and settling down in Kent, he led a bewilderingly peripatetic existence, “roaming across Europe, Africa and all around the Indian Ocean”. Moreover, in his own writings he “constantly fictionalised his past”. Artfully blending biography, history, criticism and even travel writing (the book ends with an account of a voyage up the Congo, on the trail of the Heart of Darkness), Jasanoff does an excellent job of disentangling fact from fiction. This is a “skilful, subtle, clear-eyed” and “beautifully narrated” work, even if one senses at times the difficulty of “trying to say something new” about a writer whose life story has been told so many times.
Yet this “magnificent” book is about so much more than just Conrad, said William Dalrymple in The Observer. It’s also a “profound meditation on globalisation and colonialism”. Jasanoff presents her subject as a prophet of modernity, one of the first thinkers “to grapple with the ramifications of living in a global world”. His work, she argues, foresaw many of the “great issues” of our own day – terrorism, immigration, technological change. By making Conrad relevant in this way, she has produced a work that’s “little short of a masterpiece”. I agree, said Patrick French in The Guardian. “The Dawn Watch is an expansion of the biographical form, placing an individual in total context: Joseph Conrad in world history.” As such, it deserves to “win prizes”.