Charles Gould owns the silver mine that dominates the fictional South American republic of Costaguana; Nostromo is the incorruptible man who saves the silver and is destroyed by it. Conrad spent years on this novel and considered it his most ambitious. The prose is dense, the time shifts demanding, the political vision bleak: idealism becomes corruption, revolutions eat their makers, silver corrupts everything it touches. It is Conrad's most difficult novel and, for many readers, his greatest.