IN A Penguin readers’ list of the 100 must-read classic novels, Joseph Conrad appears only once, at number 92.

[[{"fid":"27931","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]Unsurprisingly, the named work is his short novella Heart of Darkness, often found on college syllabuses and the subject of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster film, Apocalypse Now, which relocated the action from the menacing hinterland of the turn-of-the-century Congo to the US genocide in Vietnam.

Designed for the student and the general reader, Robert Hampson’s short biography of Conrad opens with a survey of the shifting literary reputation of the novelist, who has been widely acknowledged as a master stylist and innovator in the emerging 20th-century modern novel.

Where FR Leavis, arguably the most influential British literary critic of the last century, magisterially rated Conrad as one of the four  novelists in English worth reading, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, responding to Heart of Darkness, denounced Conrad as a “thoroughgoing racist.”

More recent critical battles, largely confined to academia, reflect a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of Conrad’s extensive output.

Born in tsarist-dominated Polish Ukraine in 1857, he learned English as a merchant seaman, a profession providing him with the material of his early novels and short stories. Conrad’s world view was inevitably far from that of the bourgeois Victorian literati.

Beset throughout his life by ill health and financial anxieties, his political awakening occurred in 1889 when, hospitalised in Kinshasa, he wrote of the “ruthless systematic cruelty” of the exploitation of the Congo.

The obvious fact that this experience was mirrored in Heart of Darkness refutes Achebe’s damaging but influential charge. Moreover, introducing his successful first novel Almayer’s Folly in 1895 — a story of European colonial failure set in the Borneo jungle — Conrad wrote of his belief in the bond of a common humanity.

As his career developed, his emphasis on style related as much to the form of his narrative as the honed language. In his 1887 novella The Nigger of the Narcissus, possibly his most evocative sea story, the form has been described as a series of thematically related impressionistic episodes, indicative of the modernist innovations of form he was to develop in later works.

He also introduced a narrator, often akin to the Marlow of Heart of Darkness, into his novels. This allowed an ambiguous distancing effect between the author and the reader’s questioning analysis of the moral issues within the story.

His “conservative” ideological position is perhaps the most ambiguous of all. Nostromo (1904), was claimed to be the most important political novel in English literature, while The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) mark Conrad’s deep interest in globalisation, anarchism and revolution.

“No peace for the earth can be found in the expansion of material interests,” he stated in his 1905 essay Autocracy and War.

Where the student will miss the absence of an index to this detailed coverage of Conrad’s life and works, the general reader will find Hampson’s engaging account an encouragement to read the novels of a man who saw his power as designed to make his reader to hear, feel and “above all to make you see.”

Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson is published by Reaktion Books, £11.99.