Unfortunately, the places where it isn't bad are the places where the tiresome love interest is not to be seen. And there are not many of them, and the whole purpose of the novel was to record the romantic tensions between the narrator and the allegedly captivating Dona Rita. I desperately wanted her to be captivating. For moments - when the narrator was not directly involved in the story - she was tolerable. But that is not easy to do. So swathes of the novel are tedious and pointless and frequently bordering on the incomprehensible.
These sections are thrown into relief by the scenes which don't feature Rita, or where Rita is narrating her own personal history, with the narrator dumbly standing about twiddling his thumbs.
There are moment when the ladies withdraw and the men get on with manly stuff, and that is always where Conrad is at his best. It is no wonder that his greatest novels are often the ones which are set on ships or other places where women are generally not a concern. Conrad seemed to find them profoundly puzzling and - as one of my correspondents in the recent guardian discussion pointed out - this rather damages his standing as a great novelist.
After all, if you find fully half the species profoundly incomprehensible, and intercourse (careful now!) with them deeply confusing, then you are rather limiting yourself.
I'm not so harsh, as there are many things that chaps can get up to without having to dally with girls. But it does count against Conrad that he wasn't smart enough to realise what a dreadful dead end the romantic aspects of his later novels would be. To try and fail once might have been commendable.
To try and fail repeatedly suggests either he was so arrogantly convinced of his brilliant, or he had stopped really caring and was trying to milk the formaula that had - inexplicably - made the equally muddled Chance a best seller.
No Stars
