Victory was one of Joseph Conrad’s later works, published in 1915. I can’t pretend to fully understand this complex novel. It’s not the easiest read, and yet it fascinates me for several reasons and I’ve read it more than once.
There is the resemblance to Shakespeare’s Tempest for one, although by the end the stage is littered with bodies more like Hamlet. Indeed, we might see the main character as a rather Hamlet-like figure.
The story is really fairly straightforward, but the telling of it is not, with the time shifts and changes of point of view characteristic of Conrad.
As so often with this writer, the title is ambiguous and possibly ironic; readers must decide for themselves who the winner is.
We are in Conrad’s familiar territory of the Malay Archipeligo. Axel Heyst has withdrawn from the world to live alone on the island of Samburan. His outlook on life has been influenced by his philosopher father. Heyst has drifted through life, believing that the only way to avoid doing harm is to avoid taking any action at all: “The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I think here we can safely defy the fates.”
The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.
This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.
Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.
The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.
This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.
Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.
When they arrive on the island, Heyst’s position is complicated by the fact that his Chinese housekeeper, Wang vanishes to the far side of the island, taking Heyst’s gun with him.
The stage is now set for the drama of the later part of the novel, which takes place in an intense, dreamlike atmosphere, under the shadow of the nearby live volcano sputtering on the horizon.
It is the trio of villains who make this novel so compelling. The “gentleman” Mr Jones, is tall and emaciated, with a face like a skull and a hollow voice. He is subject to strange depressive fits and bears more than a passing resemblance to Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. His henchman is Martin Ricardo, repeatedly described as catlike, an unrestrained killer, with a knife concealed under the leg of his trousers. The third is Pedro, a hardly human, Caliban-like figure, treated like an animal by the other two. Heyst says: “Here they are before you, evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at the back.”
For me, Ricardo is the most interesting and vital character in the book. His twisted mind and the strange relationship that he has with Mr Jones feels quite modern. Jones hates women and it is Ricardo’s longing for Alma that causes them to fall out. This aspect of the novel anticipates the later psychological crime fiction of writers such as Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
Indeed, Greene used Heyst’s words from Victory as the epigraph to his 1978 cold war spy story, The Human Factor. “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul.”
Read now, Victory feels like the inspiration for a lot of later writing and one of Conrad’s most influential works.
The Good Reader 