The Secret Sharer
Written by Joseph Conrad
Narrated by Cathy Dobson
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
Rather than turn his fugitive-double over to the authorities, the captain hides him in his own cabin. But on such a small ship the situation is untenable. Discovery is inevitable unless he can devise a way to let his alter ego escape before they start the long voyage across the ocean.
A gripping and multi-layered story which leaves as many questions open as it answers. Conrad at his best.
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was born to Polish parents in the Ukraine on 3rd December 1857. He grew up surrounded by upheaval. His father was exiled to northern Russia for political activities and although they eventually returned to Poland, Conrad was orphaned by the age of 11. Subsequently he was taught by his uncle, a great influence and mentor. Leaving for Marseilles in 1874, Conrad began his training as a seaman. After an attempt at suicide, Conrad joined the British merchant navy and became a British subject in 1886. After his first novel, Almayer's Folly was published in 1895 he left the sea behind and settled down to a life of writing. Indeed, as his wife wrote in 1927, he would move only "from his table to his bed, for days and days on end". Troubled financially for many years, he faced uncomplimentary critics and an indifferent public. He finally became a popular success with Chance (1913). By the end of his life on 3rd August 1924 his status as one of the great writers of his time was assured.
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Reviews for The Secret Sharer
141 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Marvelous, almost magical writing that transports the reader. Never gets old, listening to Conrad, even when the reader is a robot.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brilliant book. Well narrated.
Joseph Conrad has to rank very highly in the Pantheon of writers. Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent being two of his best. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A great, unassuming, evocative "sea" piece that raises questions of identity, loneliness, belonging and...leadership? Yep, I read that this is required reading on some Harvard list of necessary texts on leadership. I can see (sea?) that. I always forget how good Conrad can be until I get around to reading another one.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I inherited Conrad's collected works from my grandfather, and this story was included.I wrote this review for Goodreads's Short Story Club.I didn’t find the story easily comprehensible and the extensive nautical jargon didn’t improve matters. It was the narrator’s first position as captain. He was a stranger to the other officers and crew members, a stranger to the ship and “somewhat of a stranger to myself”. What does he mean by this enigmatic statement - a stranger to himself? I can’t see that he explains it elsewhere in the story, though he may have done. The captain (what is his name?) rescues a man, Leggatt, from the sea; he had been chief mate in a ship called the Sephora, moored nearby. He had accidentally killed another officer and jumped into the sea to escape eventual prosecution. The captain sees Leggatt is no homicidal maniac”, believes his story and thus agrees to hide him. He manges to conceal him in his cabin and gives him a grey “sleeping suit” just like he himself wears. The captain keeps referring to Leggatt as his double. He feels Leggatt is just like himself. He and Leggatt are “”the two strangers in the ship”. Leggatt is the captain’s “other self”. At one point the captain felt “doubly vexed” and “dual more than ever”. Why is the narrator, the captain, so fixated on regarding Leggatt as his “secret self”, a man similar to himself? He also comes to doubt whether Leggatt really is there. “Can it be” --- “that he is not visible to other eyes than mine?” “It was like being haunted.” He feels more comfortable when down below with Leggatt than with any of the others. He feels he is “near insanity”” whereas Leggatt is sane. Conrad uses many words to indicate that things are not as they seem, that they are unreal, for example, “phantom” as in “silent like a phantom sea”. My dictionary defines “phantom” as “not really existing”. Also “dreamy”, as in “a dreamy contemplative appearance”. It seems as if the captain may have some sort of mental problem and sees himself split into two. “And it was as if the ship had two captains”. The captain and Leggatt resemble each other and both wear “sleeping suits” which fact gives us the connotation of the whole thing being a dream. The captain states that part of himself is absent. He refers to “that mental feeling of being in two places at once”. To the consternation of the other officers, the captain agrees to manoeuvre the ship close to some islands so as to allow Leggatt to leave the ship and be able to survive. Leggatt, the captain’s second self, is “a free man --- striking out for a new destiny”. At the end there is a reference to “the gateway of Erebus”. According to my dictionary, Erebus is “the gloomy caverns underground through which the Shades had to walk in their passage to Hades”. To sum up, I will say that it was hard to interpret what Conrad meant to communicate to us by his story. Was he trying to illuminate some sort of psychological split in the captain? Is the whole experience some sort of dream? Is it significant that we never learn the captain’s name, as though he didn’t really exist?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Conrad's subversive little tale will leave the reader questioning what is real, what defines morality and authority, and leave an aching doubt about the nature of male-bonding...within fewer than a hundred pages.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A good tight story. Well written, compelling. A great writer doesn't have to be obtuse or arcane -- Conrad proves it here.