It takes a perverse kind of ingenuity to make a boring book out of Joseph Conrad’s life. After all, it’s hard to think of a novelist whose career was as adventurous as Conrad’s, or whose work raises more aesthetic and political passions. The man born as Joseph Korzeniowski in landlocked Berdichev in 1857 followed his youthful dream to become a ship’s captain, visiting ports from Malaysia to Venezuela. He attempted suicide in Marseilles, had a ship blown up under him in Sumatra, almost died of dysentery in the Belgian Congo, and fell in love with a mademoiselle in Mauritius.

Then, shortly after his 36th birthday, he gave it all up for good, exchanging the most romantic of callings for the most solitary and sedentary. In just a few years, he made himself into a great writer in English — not even his second language but his third, after French — and invented a new kind of novel, in which adventure and intrigue are raised to the level of moral parable. His fascination with human evil, with the cruelty and existential void lurking beneath the surface of advanced European civilization, qualifies Conrad as perhaps the first modernist writer. “I am modern,” he defiantly wrote after one publisher rejected him — so much so that it took decades for his reputation to spread beyond a small circle of admirers. It makes sense that Conrad did not become genuinely popular until World War I, when the public was finally ready to hear the prophecy in Kurtz’s dying words in “Heart of Darkness”: “The horror! The horror!”

Yet with such a story to tell, John Stape somehow manages to make “The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad” (Pantheon, 369 pages, $30) as dusty a biography as you will ever read. Page after page is filled with Conrad’s comings and goings, his voyages and publications; but of the man himself, his mind and art or even his physical presence, Mr. Stape offers barely a hint. You can’t deny that Mr. Stape gives a full chronicle of Conrad’s life from birth to death, but when he is done, he leaves you with nothing to remember. He is like a man walking down the corridor of a museum who never turns aside into a gallery, but heads straight from the front door to the exit.

This incuriosity is especially striking in a biographer of Conrad, whose story opens out onto so many alluring prospects. His early years were passed at the epicenter of Polish nationalism, which flared up in 1863 into a doomed uprising against Poland’s Russian occupiers. Several of Conrad’s relatives were involved in the struggle, and were arrested or killed as a consequence. Two years earlier, Conrad’s father, a patriotic journalist and sometime conspirator, had himself been arrested by the Tsarist police and exiled to the distant Russian city of Vologda. The freezing climate and miserable living conditions took their toll: Both Conrad’s parents contracted tuberculosis, and by the age of 11 the boy was an orphan.

Mr. Stape sketches these miserable events, but has little to say about how they must have affected the young Conrad. He was faced, it is clear, with a crushing psychic burden. He could either devote his life to the hopeless cause that killed his parents, or leave Poland behind and live with the guilt of apostasy. By choosing the second path, Conrad severed himself from his past, and his later attempt to remake himself as an Englishman has an air of desperation. (He wrote bitterly about the way English critics regarded him as “a sort of freak, a bloody amazing furriner writing in English.”)

While Conrad kept Polish causes at arm’s length for the rest of his life, there is no doubt that the guilt of his early abandonment stayed with him. There is something almost too suggestive about the fact that, when Conrad revisited Poland for the only time as an adult, he chose to go in July 1914, in the weeks between the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the beginning of World War I. Such bad timing seems like a nearly suicidal attempt at atonement, as though he unconsciously hoped to be trapped in the Poland he left so long before. Getting arrested as a British national in Austro-Hungarian territory would be a roundabout way for Conrad to become a martyr like his father.

Indeed, as Mr. Stape reveals, the Austrian government did put out an order for Conrad’s arrest. Fortunately it went astray, and the intervention of the British ambassador enabled Conrad and his family to make an “exceedingly narrow” escape back home, via Vienna and Milan. But while Mr. Stape tells this story, down to the name of the zoo Conrad visited in Hamburg and the hotel he stayed at in Cracow, he has nothing at all to say about its fascinating psychological implications.

Mr. Stape’s shyness of psychology is perhaps understandable, as a reaction against the Freudian orientation of Conrad’s last major biographer, Frederick Karl. Yet he is no more curious about practicalities — for instance, about Conrad’s life at sea, surely a subject for a biographer to sink his teeth into. What exactly would it have been like for Conrad as a sailor in the 1870s and 1880s, working his way up from apprentice to captain? What were his duties, his daily routine, his biggest challenges? What sorts of men would his fellow sailors have been, and what nautical language did they use? There must be a wealth of memoirs from which to draw a portrait of the sailor’s life in the last age of sail; but again, Mr. Stape has no interest. We learn in tedious detail the names and histories of the ships Conrad sailed on, but nothing about what being a sailor involved or what it meant to him.

Nor, finally, does Mr. Stape have much to say about Conrad as a writer of fiction. This is a deliberate decision, and a defensible one: A biography is not a critical study, and as Mr. Stape writes in his preface, “those interested in literary criticism have a huge body of work to turn to.” Yet even within these limits, Mr. Stape’s summaries of Conrad’s novels are perversely unilluminating. “Nostromo” is “a densely layered, lengthy, intricate masterwork dealing with politics, morality, and the cycles of human history”; “Typhoon” “focuses on man’s puniness and indomitability in the face of a tremendous typhoon.” Such descriptions mean nothing if you haven’t read the books in question, and not much more if you have.

It takes a special degree of hard-headedness to write about Conrad in 2008 without ever addressing the question of racism, which has dominated the critical discussion of his work for decades. The key document here is Chinua Achebe’s 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa,” a landmark of postcolonial criticism, in which the Nigerian writer cataloged the racist imagery and assumptions in “Heart of Darkness” and declared it “an offensive and totally deplorable book … which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities.”

One need not agree with this charged judgment to acknowledge that race and racism play a more central role in Conrad than in any other novelist of his stature. Even if Conrad is not a white supremacist, as Mr. Achebe charges, it is clear that his worldview depends on racial categories and what might be called a racist metaphysics — the belief that race is an essence, which renders racial divides profoundly unbridgeable. In this, he reflects some of the most “advanced” thinking of his era, which witnessed the most aggressive phase of European imperialism.

There is something emblematic about the fact that Conrad is the author of perhaps the only major English novel whose title is now unpronounceable — “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.'” Yet on this subject, too, Mr. Stape is silent. The problem is not just that Mr. Achebe’s name appears nowhere in the book, but that Mr. Stape says so little about Conrad’s actual experiences of Malays and Africans, about the racial climate in which he wrote, or about his contemporaries’ reactions to the racial imagery in his novels.

If Mr. Stape is so indifferent to the most provocative aspects of Conrad’s life, the reader is left to wonder what drew him to the subject in the first place. Why write about Conrad at all, if you don’t want to write about the things that make him Conrad? The motive, it appears, is a very old-fashioned one: simple pedantry. Nothing gives Mr. Stape more pleasure than pinning down a fact, no matter how trivial or irrelevant.

When he mentions that Conrad lived in a house called “The Pent,” he is not content to tell you, in a footnote, that “the house is mentioned in a document related to land title dating to 1787,” or that, in the 1841 Census, it was inhabited “by John Broadley, a farmer, and his wife and children.” He must also inform you that “‘Pent’ is an Old Kentish dialect word meaning ‘incline’ … possibly derived from the French pente,” and finally, with sublime relentlessness, that “pent” is “the past participle of ‘to pen.'”

When Mr. Stape can adduce a trivial fact and simultaneously point out another Conradian’s error, he is in heaven. Jessie Conrad, the writer’s wife of almost 30 years, fails to come alive at all in this book: We learn that she ended up unhappy and enormously obese, but not what drew her to Conrad or vice versa, or what their married life was like, or what role she played in his work. Yet on first introducing her, Mr. Stape takes care to note that, although Jessie was employed by the American Writing Machines when she met Conrad, she was not in fact a typist. “Conrad’s previous biographers,” he tuts, “have followed him in giving her employment as a typist … but the 1895 Postal Guide to London indicates that the company she worked for was a manufacturer of Caligraph typewriters, not a typing agency.” There is something almost endearing about this. Whatever qualities of the ideal biographer Mr. Stape lacks, no one can doubt that he has a passion for irrelevant accuracy.

akirsch@nysun.com