Conrad

Conrad is one of those writers whose language is just exhaustive. But I don't mean exhaustive in bad way. His style is easy to over look if you try hard enough. If you don't try though, you'll notice how absurdly long his sentences are!--and how specifically detailed he is in description. This amount of setting description is rarely found in modern stories nor is it ever done so well, I think.

The Secret Sharer is mostly written in a middle style of diction with some higher style words mixed in. The length of Conrad's sentences and his general syntactics can easily be overlooked because the story is that damn intense. All of his words, however, in comparison to modern day neutral/middle style writing may seem a little archaic--a little too proper--but he is, after all, English.

Another thing about Conrad--he is stellar when it comes to alliteration and consonance which adds to the parallelism strewn throughout the story. Even the title--the Secret Sharer--has alliteration.

Take a look: "My eye followed the light cloud of her smoke, now here, now there, above the plain, according to the devious curves of the stream, but always fainter and farther away, til I lost it at last behind the mitre-shaped hill of the great pagoda." His skill with connotation/poetic sound is not as blatant and blaring as a writer like Nabokov, but it is subtle and neatly sewn into the diction.

Another good example of parallelism (and more alliteration/consonance):
"But I took heart from the reasonable thought that the ship was like other ships, the men like other men, and that the sea was not likely to keep any special surprises expressly for my discomfiture."