It’s possible to make too much of a novel’s title. After all, writers often juggle wildly different alternatives for the same work: War and Peace could have been All’s Well That Ends Well; The Great Gatsby could have been The High-Bouncing Lover or Among the Ash Heaps.

Even so, for the second time running on this month’s Reading group, I have to come back to Conrad naming his book Victory. There’s no getting round it – even if, as I’ve already mentioned, Conrad himself had serious doubts about the suitability of this single, strong word. It wasn’t just the associations such a title would have in 1915 that worried him. In his note to the first edition he also said that the word “appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere novel”.

But what else could he have called this book? Because Victory is a title that changes everything about it. It directs all the action towards and sets everything up around a central set of questions: what is this victory going to be, who is going to win it and what does it mean?

Given the title’s centrality, it’s no surprise that I’m hardly the first to ask these questions. Nor will I be the first – as I am about to do – to leap right to the end of the book in an attempt to answer them. Reading group contributor NatashaFatale has pointed out as much, while including a very sensible warning for those who haven’t yet reached the closing pages:

I really would urge people to finish the book before watching any critic dissect it. Most of them go straight to the final scenes, and an awful lot of the power of that ending depends on not knowing what happens - and how.

She is right on all counts. And yet, to the final scenes I must go. After all, they are just extraordinary. If there is victory here, it comes at a heavy price. Conrad adds great lead weights to that word and plunges it into a sea of blood. Lena dies. Heyst dies. Mr Jones dies. Ricardo dies. Pedro dies. Nearly all the principals, in other words. Where can you find victory in this charnel house?

To take things at their most literal, it is possible to say that the winner is Wang, who remained on Heyst’s island after his mining company went bust. Wang gets what he wants: a quiet life with his wife, among the native islanders. Yet comprehensive as his success may be, it doesn’t bear the weight of the novel and its title. Conrad only allows us to glimpse Wang from the corner of our eye. His specialisation is “vanishing” like a ghost, hiding himself away “solitary and strange”. He is someone “mysterious”, underestimated and misunderstood by Europeans. His fascination is “not apparent” to Heyst, who mistakenly believes Wang works for him, when Wang has taken all the keys to all the buildings on the island, soon takes Heyst’s gun and comes and goes exactly as he pleases. If Conrad does want us to look for victory here, he is saying it is something we can’t understand. The way into the novel lies behind a series of doors whose keys have already vanished.

So we should look elsewhere. Sticking with characters for now, some can be ruled out quickly. There isn’t much victory to see for Pedro, the unfortunate captive of Mr Jones and Ricardo, who arrives on the island semi-conscious in the bottom of a boat and ends up dead in the same place. Ricardo too is beaten. He doesn’t get the girl. He ends up shot “neatly” through the heart by his erstwhile master, Mr Jones.

Mr Jones, meanwhile, doesn’t fare much better. He doesn’t get the loot he wanted. He loses his two servants. He ends curled up at the bottom of the sea. But there is room for doubt here. If Jones doesn’t win, he does at least score a point. He shoots Lena. On first reading, this killing seems like an accident. Heyst for one thinks Jones was aiming at Ricardo, and says ruefully when he hears of the servant’s death: “This time he did not miss.”

Here though there is a fine demonstration of Conrad’s ability to sow doubt. There may have been an accident, as Heyst thinks. But what Heyst doesn’t know is how well Jones can shoot. Remember that “neatly” when he kills Ricardo. It’s also notable that Ricardo occasionally speaks about how good his master is with a gun. He describes Mr Jones killing poor Pedro’s brother, plugging a “bullet plumb centre in Mr Antonio’s chest” in far trickier circumstances than those that did for poor Lena.

Talking of Lena, she dies believing that she has saved her man Heyst, that she has kept her love inviolate, and repaid the great favour he did in taking her away to his island in the first place. There’s even an explicit reference to her victory in her final moments: “The spirit of the girl which was passing away from under them clung to her triumph, convinced of her victory over death.”

Could this be the titular victory? Maybe. But then, why does it need to “cling” to that triumph? Is it not slipping away? And what of that “convinced”? Notice how subjective it makes the sentence. Lena is convinced, but is anyone else? Is the narrator? Is the reader? Me neither. Not any more. And that’s before we get to the cruel fact that Heyst doesn’t make it through the novel either, immolating himself alongside his lost lover, and ensuring neither of them have “victory over death”.

As for Heyst. Well. He dies at his own hand, on his own terms, but also raising many more questions than I can ever hope to answer. Not least because Heyst is such a complicated, contradictory character. Reading group contributor Dylanwolf says:

Heyst seems to me to be an existential hero in the mould of Camus’ Meursault from L’Etranger, but with a critical difference. Heyst’s existential soul is not self-imposed like Meursault’s. Instead he, like Hamlet, is meeting a duty to his father which in reality runs against his nature. It is this stark dichotomy in Heyst’s soul that Lena is attempting to defeat.

This duty to the father is to follow a bleak strain of philosophy, clearly influenced by Schopenhauer. NatashaFatale says: “Heyst was taught inaction as the only right way to live.”

If Heyst has been trying to put this philosophy into action, he has failed. He may have been the ultimate drifter, but he has taken important decisive actions. First there was Morrison and the foundation of his coal company. Then there was his taking up with Lena. His love for her is a delicate thing. Every scene where they are together is fraught with misunderstanding and potential calamity. It seems like something too fragile to endure. If he dies for her, maybe we can say the human spirit has won out over his father’s gloomy inheritance. Maybe we can say that love has triumphed. Heyst even says to Davidson: “Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life.” Perhaps his victory is that he has finally learned that love and trust?

But the opposite may be equally true. The ultimate winner may not be any individual, or anything like love. It may be that arid philosophy. After all, what has action brought? Corpses. The island has been emptied of Europeans again. The coal-trading concern has gone back to nothing. The islanders have been able to carry on. The sea comes in and out as it did before. The sun beats down.

But if that is the case, what is to stop us allowing monsters such as Jones and Ricardo free rein? And why does Conrad spend so much of the rest of the book showing us how bad they are, how ugly the world would be if they were to triumph? The horror! The horror!

Talking of awful possibilities, there’s also Schomberg, the hotelier. True, if he has won a victory, it is Pyrrhic. He caused the death of his enemy Heyst. He also lost Lena, the woman he desired. If that is victory, it is a dreadful petty thing, a long way from that “too great, too august” word Conrad worried about putting at the head of his novel.

I’m lost. But even here, I can find a contradiction. My defeat is itself a form of winning. I can’t pretend that I understand the book – but I can relish the prospect of trying again. I know that Victory has a lot more to offer, and I have a long way to go before I’ve exhausted its possibilities …