I've read and admired Maya Jasanoff's work for decades, now.  As an historian of the 18th and 19th century British Empire, she made her name with her first book Edge of Empire and then, a decade later, Liberty's Exiles.  Both of those are great books of archival historical work, on parts of the population of the British Empire.

Her newer book, The Dawn Watch, is a book about Joseph Conrad.  But it seems to me her virtues are not suited to this engagement quite as well.  Here--at least in my view--her job is not to grapple with a time, or a constellation of forces, but with a mind.  She's writing a biography of a very singular person, with a remarkable intellect.  He has come in for strong abuse since Chinua Achebe's accusations (in the 1970s) that Heart of Darkness is a racist and imperialist text, and it's clear that Jasanoff's book is provoked by an ambivalence in her about the legitimacy of those charges: a feeling that the casual racism and comfort with white supremacy in Empire is pervasive in Conrad, and yet the recognition alongside them that Conrad's works are more than that – – that his work is also one of the most devastating critiques of European (and in Nostromo, American) imperialism, and sets off disturbing reverberations which may unsettle white supremacy in readers. 

It is a fine book of research and scholarship, both in the details of Conrad's life--I'm no expert but I was informed on every page, and I'll recommend it--and in terms of setting Conrad's life in the context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Where I feel it lacks is in the thematic and moral seriousness with which it should take on its subject.

Perhaps the intellectual virtues of an historian are simply not the intellectual virtues required to grapple with the mind so singular as Conrad's.  It is often seem to me, in reading historians work, that there is almost an allergy to large thematic unity in their writing. They seem professionally suspicious of too much coherence, and I suppose that is wise, given their central profession.  Another, and perhaps a more charitable, way of saying this is that I as a reader walk away from Jasanoff's book disappointed.  I wanted my struggle with Conrad's ideas, Conrad vision of the world. She has an office content simply to report it, sometimes in relatively straightforward summaries of his novels; and so we get slightly dolled-up "Cliffs Notes" versions of The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and a few others.

I have recently finished Peter Brooks's wonderful late treatment of Henry James, Henry James Goes to Paris, about the influence of a year that the young James spent in Paris in 1875 and 1876, encountering and reflecting on the leading French, and a few Russian, novelists of the day.  Brooks's treatment never forgets the singularity of James's intellect, and never denies this serious relevance of his purposes for our lives today.  I suspect I wanted a similarly rigorous grappling with Conrad.  Instead we have a lot of labor and effort, but not complemented by a similar level of intellectual engagement.  It feels a little bit, to me at least, as if what we have is a failure to take him, as a person, as seriously as he deserves. 

It may be that the historian's craft rewards the effacement of the historian's subjectivity, where what I am looking for is a grappling between the two subjectivities, of author and subject.  It's not that Jasanoff couldn't do this--at least I don't think she couldn't do this--so I'm kind of disappointed her presence in the book is as tepid as it is.

So I may be being too harsh. The book is filled with interesting information. I just wish I had had a sense of Jasanoff's response to the world, and the worldview, Conrad offered.