An Outcast of the Islands by Joseph Conrad, (1896)

An Outcast of the Islands starts out slowly, I waited and waited for the story to pick up the pace and about a 3rd of the way thru it really started steaming along. At first I thought I was reading Victory or Lord Jim over again until it took on a life of it's own. I think that this, of the 4 Conards I've read is by far the most "Descriptive" in writing. He has whole pages devoted to a few seconds in real time, as well as pages devoted to a single human emotion, belief, or status. This book more so than the others dives deep into each character not once but several times; each time we get a look into the rational for the their latest actions.

I see Willams as an opportunistic thief with little forethought as to either the long or short term effects of his actions have on others. Like an addict he blames anyone else for his own misdeeds.
Many of Conrad's characters are familiar; a big tough guy afraid of no one, a clever opportunist looking to make a fast lot of money, and the subservient Women.

I am certainly getting the Conrad view of the world; a world that has the EuroWhites (those who are the type to go out "There" and Take) dominating the world. As I see it the type of person with this desire is the very person that posses the insatiable appetite for riches as Conrad describes them. This then is the singular type of person that "represented" EuroWhite to the rest of the world; the greedy, impatient, lawless type.

Passages that I like:

Comparing the Sea to a Women:
Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed.

 An interesting take on fatalism:
  Fatalism is born of the fear of failure, for we all believe that we carry success in our own hands, and we suspect that our hands are weak.

Powerful men in a lawless world:
He had removed an enemy once or twice before, out of his path; he had paid off some very heavy scores a good many times. Captain Tom had been a good friend to many: but it was generally understood, from Honolulu round about to Diego Suarez, that Captain Tom's enmity was rather more than any man single-handed could easily manage. He would not, as he said often, hurt a fly as long as the fly left him alone; yet a man does not live for years beyond the pale of civilized laws without evolving for himself some queer notions of justice. Nobody of those he knew had ever cared to point out to him the errors of his conceptions. 

The fate of so many:
He would be dead. He would be stretched upon the warm moisture of the ground, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing; he would lie stiff, passive, rotting slowly; while over him, under him, through him—unopposed, busy, hurried—the endless and minute throngs of insects, little shining monsters of repulsive shapes, with horns, with claws, with pincers, would swarm in streams, in rushes, in eager struggle for his body; would swarm countless, persistent, ferocious and greedy—till there would remain nothing but the white gleam of bleaching bones in the long grass; in the long grass that would shoot its feathery heads between the bare and polished ribs. There would be that only left of him; nobody would miss him; no one would remember him.