Narrator

He wrote some of the greatest novels in the English language, and English was his third language. He did not speak a word of it fluently until he was in his twenties. Polish first, French second, then English — learned at sea, from sailors and cargo manifests, in a merchant fleet where nobody was teaching him. He spoke it with a heavy accent for the rest of his life and was sometimes difficult to understand in conversation. On the page he was unimprovable. He is one of the very few writers in history to reach the first rank in a language he acquired as an adult.

He spent twenty years at sea before he published anything. He worked the ships from ordinary seaman upward, sat and passed the British examinations, and earned a master mariner's certificate, which meant he was qualified to command a British vessel anywhere in the world. He sailed to Australia, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia. He took a river steamer up the Congo in 1890, into the private colony of a Belgian king, and saw what was being done there to extract rubber; he came back with dysentery, malaria, and a permanent view of European civilisation that he could never afterwards put down. His novels are almost all built the same way: a man tells another man a story, secondhand, at night, and the reader is left to judge what the teller has understood and what he has not. He wrote a novel about anarchist bombers and police informers in London, and a novella about a company man dying up a river, and both of them are stories about what a witness gets wrong.

He was orphaned into it. Born in Russian-ruled Poland to a father who translated Shakespeare and conspired against the Empire, he was four when the family was deported to northern Russia for that conspiracy. His mother died of tuberculosis there. His father died a few years after their return, and Poland turned out for the funeral. Conrad was eleven, in the care of an uncle, in a country that officially did not exist. At sixteen he left for Marseille and the sea, which was the one thing available that had no nationality attached to it at all.

He settled in England, took citizenship, married, wrote in poverty and near-permanent ill health for years before the money came, and died of a heart attack in Kent in 1924. He turned down a knighthood. His books are still argued over, and the argument is always about the same thing: what the narrator saw, and what he was capable of saying.

Forget the twenty years at sea and the master's certificate. Remember only this: he built a career on the principle that a story is only ever as reliable as the man telling it — and he made certain you would never quite know how far to trust him.