Book review: 'The Rover' (Joseph Conrad)

Joseph Conrad's last complete novel, published in 1923, introduces us to Peyrol, a swashbuckling privateer and member of the infamous Brotherhood of the Coast for 40 years in the the Far East. He now returns to Toulon, a French Mediterranean port city in the Napoleonic era. Having gone to sea as a lad, without even a name of his own (the sailors gave him the name of the rich landowner of the small family farm he came from), he returns to the area from which he set sail all those years ago, still strong and in possession of a plundered secret treasure  (after all, this is a sea story).  He settles on a secluded farm, which is shunned by the neighbors because Scevola, the master, has a bloody history of zealotry during the French Revolution, having executed many suspected royalists. Also there are the lovely Arlette, a young woman scarred by the violence of the revolution, and her aunt Catherine.  Peyrol finds peace here for many years, until ultimately it is disrupted by the arrival of naval Lieutenant Real, who entices the old rover into one more adventure in the war against the English Navy.  (How many subsequent spy and adventure stories have we read in which the hero is reluctantly dragged out of his retirement for one more mission? This seems trite now, but may not have been when used by Conrad.)

Here the story becomes a kind of reversal on a Tale of Two Cities; in this case, the French Peyrol tricks the Lieutenant and becomes the one to place himself in danger from the English.

          Ultimately we find the members of the farm family, sans the bloody revolutionary Scevola, talking kindly about Peyrol, and remembering his kindnesses as well as his ultimate bravery. Conrad implies that the physical place remembers him as well: 'the mulberry tree, the only big tree on the head of the peninsula, standing like a sentinel at the gate of the yard, sighed faintly in a shudder of all its leaves, as if regretting the Brother of the Coast, the man of dark deeds, but of large heart, who often at noonday would lie down to sleep under its shade.'  The rover has finally come home.

Conrad was  a rover as well, having spent his life sailing the world.  At the beginning of the book he placed this poem by Spencer:

Interestingly, Conrad chose this same poem, which began his last book, as his epitaph. Perhaps this was his way as well, of finally coming home.