THE SHADOW-LINE is not one of Conrad's more obscure works, but neither is it among his most famous. It is short, beautiful and very accessible, and deserves to be read. It is about growing up, growing into ones self and conscience, with the understanding that sometimes external events come along to force the maturation process nearly overnight, and if you are lucky, you swim. As he states in the author's note that has accompanied the text since the second edition, his mind was on his son Borys and his comrades who were off fighting in World War I at the time. The landscape of his story, though, comes out of his own youthful experience at sea.
The unnamed first person narrator of THE SHADOW-LINE has already distinguished himself at sea but is still a young man given to youthful emotion and brashness. He has decided that despite friendships, his love of the sea and his skills, that there is an absence of meaning to his career and he is emphatically throwing it off at a South Seas port with the intention of going home. But then he is made the one offer he cannot resist: his own command of a full-masted commercial barque that has come to port after the captain had gone mad with disease and was buried at sea. The narrator quickly pushes to get back out on the open seas despite the fact that the first mate seems to be growing increasingly sick. Suddenly stuck out where he had originally wanted to be, the narrator is faced with the spread of illness across the crew and the discovery that his deceased predecessor had destroyed the ship's pharmacy in his derangement. The responsibility of the situation would be terrible in any circumstances, much less a first command.
The Penguin edition contains a lengthy critical introduction (ridden with spoilers, by the way), an annotated critical bibliography, and text notes. The latter define technical and arcane terms but also note where the story dovetails with facts of Conrad's own life. All of these are useful, but the novel itself is what is valuable here, with its memorable characters and honest descriptive passages of both exterior and interior worlds.
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