Typhoon is a novella by Joseph Conrad, begun in 1899 and serialised in Pall Mall Magazine in JanuaryâÂÂMarch 1902. Its first book publication was in New York by Putnam in 1902; it was also published in Britain in Typhoon and Other Stories by Heinemann in 1903.
Captain MacWhirr sails the Nan-Shan, a British-built steamer running under the Siamese flag, into a typhoonâÂÂa mature tropical cyclone of the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean. Other characters include the young JukesâÂÂmost probably an alter ego of Conrad from the time he had sailed under captain John McWhirâÂÂand Solomon Rout, the chief engineer. While MacWhirr, who, according to Conrad, "never walked on this Earth"âÂÂis emotionally estranged from his family and crew, and though he refuses to consider an alternative course to skirt the typhoon, his indomitable will in the face of a superior natural force elicits grudging admiration.
Conrad "broke new ground" by showing the ways a steam ship differs from a sailing vessel, an historic shift occurring at the time: for example how the crew are broken into "sailors and firemen [engineers]"; the unromantic labours of Hackett and Beal; and the captain as a mirror of his ship, isolated from nature and lacking the power of imagination.
Stylistically, Conrad made "perhaps the most celebrated ellipsis in modern short fiction". At the end of chapter V the story reaches a climactic point, when the ship barely makes it into the eye of the typhoon and faces a final challenge to exit the storm through the eye wall:
This is followed by a single sentence:
The story then leaps forward in time with the ship back in port, the events unstated of how this happened. This was an innovative technique with hints of post-modernism: Conrad challenges the reader to fill in the events of the story themselves. The break in the chronology is particularly effective, and jarring, as the preceding passages had been so detailed that the time it took to read the novella and the real time of the story were not so different.
In 1887, Conrad worked as chief mate on the Highland Forest under Captain John McWhir, whom he portrays in the novel as "McWhirr". He drew upon this six months' voyage for the novel.
Conrad once dictated to biographer and friend Richard Curle a list of ships he had served on, and the stories they were connected to. The connections might have been minor (a single character or incident) or major (a complete voyage), but Conrad did not indicate which. For Typhoon, he said it "suggested" the steamer John P. Best which he had served on.
Joseph Conrad dedicated the book to Cunninghame Graham, a fellow writer and Scots radical who was an enthusiastic supporter of Conrad from his earliest publications.