A uniquely fascinating novel -- depending on how you read it.

If you like stories about living a life on a ship at sea, you'll probably like this story without "reading anything into it." It stands as a good story about seamanship and travel. There are some wonderful passages that describe character interactions, and of course, the crew is in awe of James "Jimmy" Wait, the "negro" that takes a position on the ship. Again, if you like stories like Master and Commander then you'll probably like this novel as it stands.

For me, I need to read something into it in order to fully appreciate it. Conrad notoriously wrote about politics, and in this case you should definitely approach this text thinking of how much Conrad disliked socialism. Socialism and individualism, on a ship, endangers everyone that is on the ship -- think of the interaction between Jimmy and Duncan. Duncan happily stops working to tend to a sick Jimmy, so now there are two members of the crew that are not working! Darn socialists.

While this is not my favorite Conrad novel (and I'm in a course right now about "Conrad and Modernism" at the Ph.D. level) it definitely is worth reading and is one of the major six novels from his shelf. It is a sorter read as well (about 107 pages in the Norton Critical Edition) and you can decide, from this, if you want to continue with modernism or Conrad.