Raised speaking Polish and French, Joseph Conrad didn’t learn English until he was 21. But he became one of the finest of English writers

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. By Maya Jasanoff. Penguin Press; 400 pages; $30. William Collins; £25.

JOSEPH CONRAD was a phenomenon. Born to Polish parents in 1857 in a part of the Russian empire that is now Ukraine, he was christened Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. French was his second language, and he did not come to England (or speak a word of English) until he was 21. Yet such was his eventual mastery of the language that he has come to be regarded as one of the greatest writers in English.

In 1948 F.R. Leavis, a well-known literary critic at Cambridge University, listed him in “The Great Tradition” as being up there with Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James. Eight years later Walter Allen, another critic, wrote that “Nostromo” was arguably “the greatest novel in English of this century”. “Heart of Darkness” gained a new audience through “Apocalypse Now”, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic war film of 1979.

Yet readers today are often deterred by Conrad’s convoluted, prolix style. This is a pity. Many of his novels and short stories richly reward perseverance. As Maya Jasanoff, professor of British and imperial history at Harvard University, argues in a new book that blends history and literary criticism, Conrad wrote “at the turn of the 20th century” of many of the global forces and perils that afflict the world today.

The novelist was orphaned at 11, his parents having succumbed to illness after being exiled for revolutionary activity to “the gates of Siberia”. At 16 he ran away to sea. For nearly 20 years he worked as an ordinary seaman from Marseille where, suffering from debt and despair, he appears to have attempted suicide. Later he became a fully qualified British master mariner, and travelled the world, particularly the archipelagoes and peninsulas of South-East Asia, where many of his tales are set. Conrad, Ms Jasanoff writes, “belonged to the last generation of seafarers who worked primarily on sailing ships”, which he called “the aristocracy”. In his writings he “transformed the British sailing ship into a gold standard for moral conduct”.

Sailing to Australia as first mate on the Torrens, he befriended John Galsworthy, a young lawyer who went on to write “The Forsyte Saga”, which eventually won him a Nobel prize. Then, in 1894, with no command in view, Conrad abandoned the sea and published his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly”. The journey from native-born Pole to sailor to writer was complete. Two years later, after a short, awkward courtship, he married the seemingly unsuitable Jessie George, settled contentedly in Kent, fathered two sons and dedicated the rest of his life to writing.

In “The Dawn Watch” Ms Jasanoff describes her own journeys in search of Conrad—four weeks on a French cargo ship across the Indian Ocean and a complicated trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. She skilfully integrates details of Conrad’s life and accounts of his four greatest works, linking the challenges and forces that lie behind and within the novels to those of the 21st century.

If not as cosmopolitan as today, London in the 1890s contained 50,000 continental Europeans—“more than all the population of Krakow”. (Conrad might be curious to know that Poles are now the largest foreign-born group in Britain.) Russian revolutionaries and militant Irish nationalists inspired “The Secret Agent”, set in a grimy, Dickensian London, an ironic treatment of plotting and terrorism and a bomb that goes off at the wrong moment, killing an innocent simpleton. Then, as now, the threats of anarchism and terrorism fuelled anti-immigrant feeling. As Ms Jasanoff writes: “When you think a foreigner might take your job, you protest. When you think a foreigner might kill you, you panic.”

If “The Secret Agent” is told in an easily readable manner, “Lord Jim”, which had come out seven years earlier, is altogether more exotic and demanding. Captain Marlow, Conrad’s recurrent narrator, describes how in a moment of confusion a “powerfully built” young Englishman abandons a ship loaded with pilgrims that appears to be sinking. Conscience-stricken and haunted, Jim repeatedly tries to make a new start, but just when he appears to be prospering he is destroyed. This meandering narrative, Ms Jasanoff writes, “spoke in a metaphor [that] imperialists could appreciate”, in particular about the moral uprightness of “the right sort” of Englishman. It was recognised as having great originality and inspired many younger writers, though not everyone was convinced. For E.M. Forster, “the secret casket of his genius contained a vapour rather than a jewel.” But Ms Jasanoff states that “for Conrad, the vapour was the jewel.”

“Heart of Darkness”, which came out in 1902, two years after “Lord Jim”, arose from Conrad’s brief and sickening experience of Belgian exploitation of the then Belgian Congo. He was appalled by the treatment of the Africans and the ivory trade, as exemplified in the novel by Kurtz, the agent who came promising civilisation but turned to vile savagery and eventually expired, uttering the words, “The horror! The horror!”

Conrad expressed similar concerns in the more substantial “Nostromo” of 1904. For the first time he wrote about an imaginary place, the South American republic of Costaguana, but it was “a novel about every place he’d been”. It projected all his political cynicism, his nostalgia for a pre-technological age and his fears for a future dominated by “material interests”.

Ms Jasanoff says she set out to explore Conrad’s world “with the compass of a historian, the chart of a biographer, and the navigational sextant of a fiction reader”, and these have served her well. Anthony Powell, a novelist, once described Conrad as “an enigmatic figure. The more we read about him, the less we seem to know him.” This biography may not fully reveal the mystery behind the man, but it is a powerful encouragement to read his books.