This book is set during the “Long Blockade” of Toulon, which set the stage for the Battle of Trafalgar. I needed some research on this to make sense of the plot, but the real focus is character study. I was particularly interested in the exploration of the impact of being a “survivor” of the French Revolution: ex-Royalists living next door to ex-Jacobins who wiped out half their extended families, the memories of denunciations and blood running in the streets. The title character is a man of no national or political identity, another compelling theme.

A straightforward adventure story, which, beneath the surface, explores the motivations and fears for having lived a life with meaning. Its elegiac and melancholy tone would have made it a fitting work with which Conrad might have concluded his writing career. As it was, The Rover was his last completed work before his death, with the unfinished Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel published posthumously. In form, it appears initially as a linear tale, but it is one that washes back in forth like a series of waves, gliding into transitions, taking up different perspectives, and only then returning to the origins of those points of view. It's quite a subtle effect, and one that illuminates both characters and the trails of the plot in a multi-layered fashion.

Like many of Conrad's protagonists, Peyrol, the Rover of the title, is a liminal character. His life away from the sea, albeit stretching over years and years, long enough for his hair to turn white, is but a temporary lull. He awaits his final return to the sea, a place of no fixed boundaries, no sense of permanence, no true identity, just as Peyrol's life was at Escampobar, the farmhouse where he has sought refuge after his time as a corsair in the Indian Ocean.

This is not a story of redemption. Rather, it is about the impossibility of certain men ever belonging to anything other than the tempests that drag them into adventure, literal or imaginary. Peyrol seems to mimic Conrad himself in this regard. Fitting, then, that the ultimate chapter is drawn from Conrad's own experience in narrowly escaping a coastal interceptor early in his life, as described towards the end of his autobiographical work, The Mirror of the Sea.

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This was a little hard to follow at times. I needed an atlas to figure out where things were happening, & sometimes it was stories about things that happened in the past. The other book needed (or website) was translation from French to English, since this story took place in France it has a lot of phrases I didn't know. It starts out not long after the French Revolution, deals with the after effects. It reminds me of what I've heard about the revolution in Russia. ( )