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I've been holding back because I haven't been quite sure what I thought. I was alternately engrossed and put off; there were times when the prose swept me away and times when I wanted Conrad just to get on with it. My thoughts are still scattershot and haven't coalesced, but I'll say that ultimately, I think Conrad's taking on Dostoevsky was a losing proposition and the book would have been better without
The narrator didn't work for me, either. What I took most from him was the message that Westerners can't understand Russia. There's the English narrator from a country whose Civil War was a brief hiatus in the status quo, and the setting in a tiny republic surrounded by mountains which Conrad I thought rather obviously contrasted with the limitless horizons of Russia.
I too felt sorry for Razumov until his histrionics put me off. And really, I think the character as originally presented would have been at peace with his decision. He owed nothing to Haldin who in fact was a murderer and didn't share his poiltics. Whyever shouldn't he turn him in? And Haldin, I think, presents that problem where we only see a character through others' eyes and don't get a chance to empathize with him the way we do with a character whose thoughts and actions we know first-hand.
The best bits for me were the revolutionaries, largely corrupt and seeking power for themselves; Conrad evoked the machinations of a whole movement through that one small cell. And I thought the individual characters were very well drawn. Tekla in particular, as someone whom the revolution ate up and spat out, was symbolic of women's general fate in revolutions, where their role is more to serve the revolutionaries than the oppressed. I inwardly cheered at her assuming control of her destiny on her own terms and wondered at how successfully Natalia would maintain her own integrity.
I thought this was good but The Secret Agent was far better. The London setting was very specific and grounded in its geography where St. Petersburg and Geneva, I thought, were merely suggested. More importantly, both the sense of menace and the explication of the global mechanics of revolution were heightened by the stateless aspect of the revolutionaries.
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