Like Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s 1895 novel Almayer’s Folly, his first, is about a white man alone up a river. Instead of the Congo River in Africa there is the Pantai in Borneo, and Almayer is no charismatic Kurtz. Conrad’s earlier work is the story of a Dutch trader, born and raised in Batavia, who goes to work in Macassar. There he is adopted by Captain Lingard, the legendary Rajah Laut, most powerful sailor in the land. Lingard invites the young Almayer to marry his adopted daughter, a Malay girl whom he rescued from pirates and sent to a convent.
“And don’t you kick because you’re white!” he shouted, suddenly, not giving the surprised young man the time to say a word. “None of that with me! Nobody will see the colour of your wife’s skin. The dollars are too thick for that, I tell you!”
Almayer doesn’t kick at all, though he does assume it will be “[e]asy enough to dispose of a Malay woman, a slave, after all, to his Eastern mind, convent or no convent, ceremony or no cemerony.” And so the happy couple is installed in Sambir, a village on a river whose entrance is known only to Lingard, giving them a monopoly on trade.
Unfortunately for Almayer, one of the few things his wife understands from her convent studies is that “according to white men’s laws she was going to be Almayer’s companion and not his slave.” Considering herself kidnapped, not rescued, by Lingard, she had been forced to treat him well because she believed him her master. But left alone with Almayer, after they have a child, she turns wild, burning their expensive imported furniture at the cookfire, giving up “the hateful finery of Europe,” and eventually moving out of the main house and into a small hut on the grounds where she sullenly chews betel-nut.
This is only the first of Almayer’s disappointments. The dollars never do get thick enough to blot out the color of Mrs. Almayer’s skin, and worse, they never could have made husband and wife understand anything at all about each other. Lingard doesn’t even know the woman after spending years doting on her. And the light of Almayer’s life, his daugher Nina, presents him with just as much of a problem—though he does see her as white and a part of himself, and therefore doesn’t even realize the gap.
She had little belief and no sympathy for her father’s dreams; but the savage ravings of her mother chanced to strike a responsive chord, deep down somewhere in her despairing heart; and she dreamed dreams of her own with the persistent absorption of a captive thinking of liberty within the walls of his prison cell.
Almayer is a bit like Dowell, in that he doesn’t really understand anybody, and often looks like a fool because of it. But he’s pigheaded, sometimes aware of his ignorance and angry about it, but more often stubbornly blind in a way lacking any of Dowell’s charm. He’s also not a very good man. But his story is still sad.
Almayer’s Folly, and Conrad’s next novel An Outcast of the Islands, are both told in the third-person limited voice. Conrad changes those limits as the thread of the story passes from one character to another, and while many of the later more sophisticated techniques of literary impressionism are missing, this gives the work a prismatic quality. Each turn of the narrative filters the story through a new perceiver. Not only do we witness action when by Nina’s side that we would have missed with Almayer, the narrative assigns those actions different meanings. A speech that is sniveling to one set of ears is clever to another; a deceitful man is wise; an inexplicable act is justified. An excellent first novel, even if not as sophisticated as his later work. Minor Conrad is better than major ___.
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