Arrow of Gold

This novel draws on Conrad's experiences as an arms smuggler during the Carlist Wars. It is a novel about young unrequited love written when Conrad was no longer young and his powers were failing but it is one of my favourite books. There is a marvellous control of tone and the central female character is fantastic. The events are not sentimentalised and there are intensely realised scenes and vivid character sketches even if the psychological and political elements so strong in earlier novels are here rather dimmed. It suffers by comparison with his great work but is well worth reading.

When I was young I admired Conrad because he was a seaman like me and he was writing in a language he had learned (Like me now). But I admire him even more now because he had a genuine independent mind and it could only have been truly liberated by being a man of no real nation - a Pole but an expatriate - an English writer but not an Anglo-Saxon - a political voice but not part of the English middle-class of his time. A human being first - everything else was a long way second.