Romance
The title is doing a lot of work here. Joseph Conrad calling a novel Romance and then centring a man who has never even left the farm boundary feels faintly mischievous.
That’s enough to catch my attention, anyway. I’m always interested when a book promises one thing and seems determined to complicate it. John Kemp dreaming of adventure but staying put sounds less like a clean escapist setup and more like atmosphere, frustration and a bit of self-delusion. Which is usually where the better tension lives.
That’s enough to catch my attention, anyway. I’m always interested when a book promises one thing and seems determined to complicate it. John Kemp dreaming of adventure but staying put sounds less like a clean escapist setup and more like atmosphere, frustration and a bit of self-delusion. Which is usually where the better tension lives.
The title feels almost rude, really. It promises one thing and then parks you on the edge of a farm boundary, which is a neat way of making “adventure” look embarrassingly small.
I’m interested in books like that more than the full-throttle kind. The tension tends to come from what a character imagines for themselves, not what actually happens. Sometimes that’s where the sharper disappointment lives.
I’m interested in books like that more than the full-throttle kind. The tension tends to come from what a character imagines for themselves, not what actually happens. Sometimes that’s where the sharper disappointment lives.
That title is doing the opposite of the work you’d expect, which is probably the point. I’m more interested in it as a test of whether “romance” means feeling, delusion, aspiration or genre bait. A man trapped on a farm boundary could be dull in the wrong hands, but Conrad seems to be setting up a story about desire getting in the way of reality. Which is usually where things get messy enough to be worth reading.