Victory

Perhaps all you need to recommend Victory to you is to be told that Joan Didion rereads it before she starts every novel she writes. That's what got me to open it a few years back, and I wasn't disappointed. She admires the "fantastic distancing" of Conrad's familiar third-hand narrator; I found I loved the way it turns out to contain a whole collection of characters roused from their usual passivity into action. No matter what you find in it, it's likely to remind you that the great masters were working at a level of subtlety and complexity of character and story that's hard to find these days (and no doubt was then too).