Conrad

Good god this took such a long time for me to read even though it wasn't that long. His descriptions felt like that would never end. The writing just seemed cliche to me, which might be another reason why I had trouble getting through this.

"When I left him there to go back to my room the steward was finishing dusting. I sent for the mate and engaged him in some insignificant conversation. It was, as it were, trifling with the terrific character of his whiskers; but my object was to give him an opportunity for a good look at my cabin. And then I could at last shut, with a clear conscience, the door of my stateroom and get my double back into the recessed part. There was nothing else for it. e had to sit still on a small folding stool, half smothered by the heavy coats hanging there. We listened to the steward going into the bathroom out of the saloon, filling the water bottles there, scrubbing the bath, setting things to rights, whisk, bang, clatter -- out again into the saloon -- turn the key click. Such was my scheme for keeping my second self invisible. Nothing better could be contrived under the circumstances. And there we sat; I at my writing desk ready to appear busy with some papers, he behind me out of sight of the door. It would not have been prudent to talk in daytime; and I could not have stood the excitement of that queer sense of whispering to myself. Now and then, glancing over my shoulder, I saw him far back there, sitting rigidly on the low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded, his head hanging on his breast -- and perfectly still. Anybody would have taken him for me."

We have varying long and short sentences. A lot of dependent clauses and plenty of room to break up them up in order to make them more simple to read. He packs so much info into his sentence that it ends up running for multiple lines. He trys to make it sound like if it is a stream of consciousness as if he is simply remembering these events. But nobody actually talks or thinks like this.
There are some parallels between him and his double here. He felt that this man was him in a different body. Anybody would have mistaken him for the captain. They also had similar manners of behaving. I think the captain saw a lot of his younger self in this boy and thats why he wants to protect him.

"On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned for ever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach."

As far as word choice, we have an overall medium style of writing. He varies between simple language and more complex words, though I think he likes to use the more latin rooted words. Speaking of prolonged sentences, the example above is only the first sentence of the passage. It could have been broken up to at least five sentences.

Overall he did a go job at pointing you in a place. He's very good at giving visuals, even the process of reading his work is difficult. He succeeded in making a certain eerie mood that followed to the end as well. In other words, the tone and emotional state was consistent.