The Ideals of the French Revolution are also a theme of this novel. and that's enough of the plot, mes amis! Suffice it to say that mighty passions are excited. A young French officer arrives at Peyrol's sequestered cove, with a cunning plan that could change the course of events. Toulon and its coastline are under embargo, sealed by the British fleet. The fictive realization of Peyrol's character is among Conrad's best the old man is magnificent yet believable.Īs 'fate' would have it - and 'fate' is a theme of this novel - eight years later, Napoleon has further betrayed the ideals of the Revolution and the denouement is approaching at Trafalgar. Most of the story is narrated in the conventional omniscient third-person from over the broad shoulders of Peyrol, a man of implacable self-control. By an unforeseeable chance, he finds himself lodging in the farm/inn of a woman-of-allure, Arlette - beautiful, unfathomable, half-mad, the victim of the insanity of the betrayed Revolution. His native France is, to him, the most foreign of lands, but nonetheless he decides to take haven there, to root himself in peaceful retirement.

A peasant orphan carried off to the Indian Ocean before the French Revolution, an adventurer-pirate who eventually took stock of his life and became a 'regular' sailor in the French navy, Peyrol returns to Toulon just after the Reign of Terror. Et puis, violà, mes amis! My review title has a 'tres ingénieux' double meaning! Let's hear some applause.Ĭonrad always had a knack for portraying sturdy, resolute, 'heart-of-oak' old seamen, on the verge of their last 'voyage'. The 'Rover' of the story, Jean Peyrol, is an old man also, white-haired but still formidable, who is smitten by a Romance as quixotic and unfulfillable as that of any 12th C Provencal troubadour for his Lord's Lady. He must have been an 'old man' physically - he died a year later - with an old man's indifference to the profundities of his own earlier novels, since The Rover is a mellow historical Romance, a gently rolling tale of indomitable courage, sudden passion, and loyalty. Joseph Conrad was sixty-six years old, a few years younger than I am now, when 'The Rover' was first published in 1923.

The rover conrad