Conrad's greatness, his not-so-greatness, and his racism

Even Conrad's staunchest defenders - WS? FRL? - cannot possibly make a case for the end of Victory, a melodramatic, contrived, engineered, almost screwball conclusion in which the woman in distress, Lena, pretend to let the card-sharp, Ricardo, come on to her in one of the most awkward and clumsy seduction scenes ever written (he ends by kissing her foot!) in order to get close enough to him to steal his concealed knife - but her lover/protector, Heyst, mistakenly thinks she's betrayed him and aligned with Ricardo and the other two thugs out to rob them. And then - who knows? - it's so weirdly complex, but in essence she's shot by the leader of the gang (Mr. Jones) and by pure chance the traveling merchant shows up on the island and ends up on giving us a report on the demise of all the characters, who variously shoot one another and self-immolate. Only the servant, Wang, and his Malay wife, whom we never see, seem to survive. I honestly couldn't make sense of it - and, after all, what does it matter? It seems to me Conrad at this stage in his career was trying to write potboiler, sensational romances an adventure stories -but sometimes his own intelligence gets in the way - he can't help but create characters who speak w/ a great deal of nuance and scenes of occasional haunting beauty, in other words, literary fiction - but these are not his best works and don't stand up well against the maritime novels and stories, plus a few oddities like The Secret Agent, as mentioned in yesterday's post. I have to say I'm continuously troubled as well by his colonial mentality and his not-so-subtle racism, far more than was typical of his time, I think - w/ his casual and offhand use of racial epithets (the author's intro to the 1920 complete works edition is an embarrassment today) and, more subtly, his complete dismissal of the lives, even the presence, of anyone not white: for example, he continuously describes the island on which most of Victory takes place as uninhabited except for Heyst, Lena, and servant, Wang (and Wang's unseen Malay wife) and only in the very last pages of the novel is there a passing reference to the native villages on the island. When he says inhabited by only one man he means, quite literally, by only one white man.