The Rover (novel)
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The Rover is the last complete novel by Joseph Conrad written between 1921 and 1922, first published in 1923.
It is set in the south of France, against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Napoleon's rise to power and the French / English rivalry in the Mediterranean. Peyrol a master-gunner in the French republican navy, pirate and for nearly fifty years ‘rover of the outer seas’ attempts to find refuge in an isolated farmhouse (Escampobar) on the Giens Peninsular near Hyères.
The story is about Peyrol's attempt at withdrawal from an action and blood filled life; his involvement with the pariahs of Escampobar and the struggle for his identity and allegiance which is resolved in his last voyage.
Conrad placed the epigraph from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
on the title page. This also became Conrad's epitaph.
