This title most often hangs on the coattails of Joseph Conrad‘s much more popular work, Heart of Darkness (think Signet Classics), and therefore also often gets ignored. But I’m not sure why, for if I had to choose one of these titles to promote to the masses, it’d be the far more entertaining story, The Secret Sharer, than the much stranger Heart of Darkness.
In this story, Conrad’s main characters remain in their place of comfort, aboard a ship at sea, only this time in a much more surreal scenario than in any of his other tales I’ve read. From a first-person perspective, a fresh sea captain aboard an unfamiliar ship crewed by men he barely knows divulges a tale that’s barely believable, yet likewise quite possible. In the fashion of Edgar Allen Poe, Conrad paints a dark picture as this captain—strangely alone on deck in the night watch—discovers a naked man hanging onto the ship’s ladder, exhausted and terrified.
The captain brings the man aboard, and discovers so many coincidences between them that he wonders if this man might not actually be his own other self—the source of the book’s surrealism. Secreting the guest away to his cabin at the man’s behest, he comes to find that this man is a sailor wanted for murder. Thus, our speaker must keep the man hidden from his crew and from the sailor’s own captain, an angry old dog who himself eventually boards this ship in search of a stowaway.
The suspense in this story is heavy and quite enjoyable, especially as the uniqueness of the tale keeps the reader guessing. I can’t tell if Conrad has any goal besides entertainment here, but no matter. His stories describe the very real and dangerous job of life at sea during a very true time in history, and we modern readers can learn much from his authentic tales.
I find it shocking that Conrad, a man gifted in setting scenes and evoking emotions in his readers, was not a native-born English speaker. His skill in wielding this second language (at least) is an inspiration to those of us who struggle to learn a foreign tongue. If he who learned this language from newspapers can write these tales with such fluency and deep emotion, then perhaps there’s hope for me to converse semi-intelligently about politics or art in Chinese. Perhaps.
As with Conrad’s other tales, like Typhoon and Youth, I was pleasantly entertained and highly recommend him. A true classic in the literary adventure genre.
©2018 E.T.
Read More from Joseph Conrad:
- Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Youth (1898)
- Typhoon (1902)
- The Secret Sharer (1910)
- Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2020; adapted by Peter Kruper)