There is a sort of lucidity proper to extravagant language.

Joseph Conrad burst upon the literary world in 1895 with his first novel, ‘Almayer’s Folly’. It announced an author with a detailed knowledge of the life of merchant seamen and traders far away in remote ports and settlements of the Far East, a writer with a florid, exotic style, and a man obsessed with futility and death. For the next nine years Conrad produced a series of short stories and novellas all with more or less the same distant setting, themes and style.

But Conrad had ambitions to move out of this initial niche and surprised everyone in 1904 by publishing his longest novel, ‘Nostromo’, which switches geographical location and subject matter entirely, being about revolutionaries in South America.

‘The Secret Agent’ is an even more conscious change of scene and subject matter from Conrad’s initial brand, in at least three ways:

1. almost all his previous novellas and short stories were set in the Far East, in the ports of Thailand or Malaysia or on the high seas; this was his first story set entirely in the capital of his adoptive country
2. most of the novellas and short stories up to this point focused on one dominating protagonist, often named in the title: Almayer, Peter Willems, Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Jim in Lord Jim, Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon, Falk and so on; ‘Secret Agent’ marks a break by being equally about a handful of four or five characters; it is far more collegiate, there is no one dominating figure
3. Conrad’s style is very sober and reined in – still fluent and loquacious but noticeably less so than in his ‘exotic’ writings; it’s still sometimes florid, sometimes obscure, but it’s as if it’s sobered down to suit London’s chilly, foggy location

As to the subject matter. ‘The Secret Agent’ plunges us straight into the world of London’s underworld of professional revolutionaries and anarchists along with the police and officials who combat them. At least it plunges into Conrad’s vision of those things. How accurately the book relates to any such underworld in Edwardian London is obviously a matter for history specialists. In practice, like most novels ‘The Secret Agent’ feels very small, focusing on a handful of characters – the secret agent, his wife and brother-in-law; just four named professional revolutionaries; and three representatives of the police and Scotland Yard.

Right at the end we are told that it is set in 1886. The Verlocs were married on 24 June 1879 and their marriage lasted seven years till the events the story narrates.

Characters

Adolf Verloc is a professional agent provocateur. Contrary to the image that evokes, he is a fat, slothful, lazy man. He maintains a dingy shop selling dirty postcards and French novels, helped out by his wife, Winnie. They’ve been married for seven years. They met when he took rooms in a boarding house run by her mother in Belgravia, and presented himself as an attractive means of escaping her narrow slavey life.

Now her old mother lives in the back room. Also living with them is Winnie’s younger brother, Stevie, who is ‘simple’ and given simple tasks around the house and shop. When not doing simple chores he sits at a deal table:

drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.

Winnie knows Verloc has a small circle of very intense friends. What she doesn’t realise is that they are professional revolutionaries. They are:

Karl Yundt:

The all but moribund veteran of dynamite wars had been a great actor in his time—actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews. The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice. He was no man of action; he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing noise and foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and revolt. The shadow of his evil gift clung to him yet like the smell of a deadly drug in an old vial of poison, emptied now, useless, ready to be thrown away upon the rubbish-heap of things that had served their time.

Michaelis, first name unmentioned, who has spent 15 years in prison because of his involvement with a cack-handed attempt to rescue some prisoners from a police van which went wrong, described on page 96. Now he is now morbidly obese, weighing maybe 18 stone.

He had come out of a highly hygienic prison round like a tub, with an enormous stomach and distended cheeks of a pale, semi-transparent complexion, as though for fifteen years the servants of an outraged society had made a point of stuffing him with fattening foods in a damp and lightless cellar.

Michaelis has an upper-class fan, an aristocratic lady who has taken the fat revolutionist into her salon as a conversation piece, and then sets him up in a moss-covered cottage to write his memoirs, Autobiography of a Prisoner (p.103).

Comrade Alexander ‘Tom’ Ossipon, nicknamed ‘the Doctor’, an ex-medical student without a degree; afterwards a wandering lecturer to working-men’s associations upon the socialistic aspects of hygiene; author of a popular quasi-medical study entitled ‘The Corroding Vices of the Middle Classes’; special delegate of the mysterious Red Committee, together with Yundt and Michaelis.

There’s a fourth who sits to one side of these three and despises them, known only as the Professor, because he is an expert in explosives.

His title to that designation consisted in his having been once assistant demonstrator in chemistry at some technical institute. He quarrelled with the authorities upon a question of unfair treatment.

The Professor thinks the other three are typical of their groups in that they don’t actually want anything to change, they enjoy feeling like exciting desperados and are trapped by their symbiotic relationship with the very system they claim to despise. Whereas the Professor wants to destroy. In a scene with Ossipon the Professor reveals that he carries a little vial of explosive around with him everywhere and has his left hand permanently on a little detonator in his left pocket. If the police ever try to arrest him, he’ll explode it and take half the street with him.

Ranged against them are some representatives of the British establishment, namely:

• Chief Inspector Heat of the Special Crimes Department
• The Assistant Commissioner of the Police
• The Home Secretary, Sir Ethelred

Police complicity with the revolutionaries

A key and ironic premise of the book is that the police know the names of all the revolutionists. None of them are really secret at all. Inspector Heat knows not just the names but the addresses and usually the day-to-day movements of Michaelis, Yundt, Ossipon, the Professor and many more. In fact the police and the revolutionaries have a sort of working relationship or understanding, what the narrator calls ‘the rules of the game’ (p.105).

This is demonstrated when Heat bumps into the Professor in a side street and they have an uneasy standoff which ends because Heat, for the time being, wants to leave the anarchist alone.

Verloc the provocateur

What none of the revolutionaries nor Heat know is that Verloc is actually a double agent. He is an agent provocateur. Although a member of various Red Councils, a great speaker at socialist meetings and working men’s assemblies, Vice President of The Future of the Proletariat, enthusiastic friend of Ossipon, Yundt and Michaelis – he is in fact in the pay of reactionary, anti-revolutionary foreign embassy and has been for years, 11 years to be precise.

So Verloc is the secret agent of the title.

What kick-starts the plot is that his old handler at this (unnamed) foreign embassy, an old boy named Baron Stott-Wartenheim (‘pessimistic and gullible’) has retired and been replaced in the London embassy by a new go-getter, the First Secretary, Mr Vladimir, ‘a young man with a shaven, big face, sitting in a roomy arm-chair before a vast mahogany writing-table’.

Softly spoken Vladimir tells fat slothful Verloc that the good times are over. The secret service is not a philanthropic institution and Verloc is going to have to start to pull his weight. To be precise, he needs to cause a sensation, a ‘spectacular’, an egregious atrocity,

Why? Because Vladimir and his country are offended that the British authorities are so lax and permissive and ‘liberal’ as to allow countless revolutionaries to thrive in London pretty much untouched, revolutionaries who threaten the basis of his own government, back home. The British police, British society as a whole are, in Vladimir’s view, relaxed and permissive: ‘England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty.’

Therefore Vladimir wants Verloc to commission some kind of spectacular atrocity which will wake up the British authorities and force the police to crack down. The complacent British bourgeoisie needs ‘a jolly good scare’. What is needed is a string of outrages to sting the authorities into a universal repression. Otherwise, Vladimir threatens, his office will stop paying Verloc.

And Vladimir goes further, straying into socio-philosophical territory, when he suggests that his government doesn’t want Verloc to assassinate someone (old hat), or blow up a bank (predictable) but strike at the conceptual foundations of bourgeois society. Which is why he suggests attacking time itself – a bit of dialogue which, for a moment, threatened to turn the story into a whole different type of novel, some kind of science fiction story. Normality is, however, quickly restored, when Vladimir explains that, in practice he just means blowing up the Greenwich Observatory, home of the meridian which, in a sense, during Britain’s heyday, anchored time zones all round the world.

So that is the setup. A fat, seedy complacent middle-aged ‘revolutionary’ who for over a decade has been pocketing money from a foreign embassy to report on radicals and anarchists in London, is told by his new young handler that he needs to pull his finger out and organise a spectacular ‘outrage’ or the embassy will cut off his funding, which has formed most of his family income…

The Assistant Commissioner connection

To digress for a moment, the novel is full of incongruous complicities. I’ve mentioned the way Inspector Heat knows all the revolutionaries by name and they know him and both sides leave each other alone, according to ‘the rules of the game’.

Higher up the food chain something similar obtains for Inspector Heat’s boss, the Assistant Commissioner of Police. This man was enjoying being a police officer in an imperial colony until he came home and made a good marriage but his new wife didn’t fancy the tropical heat. So he had to pack in his colonial career, stay in London and took the Assistant Commissioner post. He’s had it for 18 months when the narrative begins.

So far, so banal, but the ironic gag Conrad concocts is the notion that the Assistant Commissioner’s wife is supported and mentored by the same posh lady who is Michaelis’s patron. This leads to the humorous situation whereby the Assistant Commissioner attends the same parties as Michaelis, in fact has to stand by while the posh lady sings the praises of the lovely, sweet man, a visionary, a ‘saint’ who simply wants to bring fairness to society and food to the poor etc. The posh lady patron is depicted as irredeemably dim, but the bite to the situation is that the Assistant Commissioner knows that if he is involved in putting Michaelis behind bars, the posh lady will know about it and will never forgive his wife – and his wife will never forgive him.

The Greenwich bomb

Why is all this an issue? Because, with unexpected abruptness, in chapter 4 on page 65 of this 249-page-book, we learn that a bomb has gone off in Greenwich Park. Ossipon tells the Professor about it. Seems some unknown person was carrying a bomb, tripped over a tree root and blew themselves to pieces.

In the next chapter Chief Inspector Heat is called to the scene of the explosion and sees for himself the body blown into myriad pieces as by a demented butcher. Amid the fragments of bloody cloth, Heat discovers a piece which, amazingly, has an address written on it, 32 Brett Street. He pockets it as he walks away for, as an expert on the revolutionary underground, he knows it is the address of Adolf Verloc. The police have interviewed a witness who said she saw two figures come out of the nearby Tube station, a fat older man and a thinner younger one. The reader – well, this reader – immediately realises this is Verloc and Stevie and strongly suspects the person blown to pieces was poor simple Stevie.

(Note: a lot later in the book we are told that precisely a month, a long and aggravating month, separated Verloc’s interview with Mr Vladimir and the tragic bomb blast, p.209.)

The authorities

Heat reports to the Assistant Commissioner for the Police. (This is where we learn that the latter’s wife is friends with the posh lady who supports the obese revolutionist Michaelis and Heat senses his reluctance to place Michaelis in the frame). But, having dispatched Heat, the Assistant Commissioner goes to see his own superior, the Secretary of State, Sir Ethelred.

The depiction of Sir Ethelred, and the charming young man, his principle private secretary who everyone calls ‘Toodles’, this is all done with suavity and humour. Conrad deploys the Dickensian tactic of turning people into objects:

The Assistant Commissioner’s figure before this big and rustic Presence had the frail slenderness of a reed addressing an oak.

But more Dickensian is the association of characters with certain key words which are then drummed home. Thus Michaelis can’t be referred to without the phrase ‘the ticket-of-leave apostle’. And the secretary of state’s key word is ‘expansion’ or ‘expanded’.

Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which, broadened at the base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped in the fringe of thin greyish whisker, the great personage seemed an expanding man… A shiny silk hat and a pair of worn gloves lying ready on the end of a long table looked expanded too, enormous.

The big time shift and switch to Winnie

All Conrad’s fictions up to this point deploy sophisticated manipulation of time frames. The narrative never just sets off and follows simple chronological order. In the hands of a narrator like Charles Marlow (who narrates Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Youth) the narrative continually interrupts itself to go back a few years, get someone else’s eye-witness account, sometimes juggling multiple time zones and frame narratives.

‘The Secret Agent’ is, on the whole simpler than all that, with the events in one chapter often following on simply from that before – with one big exception. Chapter 8, starting precisely half way through the text goes back in time. I’ve explained how the revolutionists heard about someone blowing themselves up in Greenwich Park as early as page 65, and how Heat visits the crime scene, spots the fragment of fabric with Verloc’s address on it, has an interview with his boss the Assistant Commissioner, who himself is called in to brief the Secretary of State. All this, obviously enough, follows the explosion.

But when we start reading chapter 8 we find ourselves transported back to several weeks before the explosion. In fact the narrative makes what appears to be quite a big digression which I found obscure and hard to follow, to begin with. Suddenly it is describing the motivation of Winnie’s aged mother, Verloc’s mother-in-law, who has decided she needs to move out of the Verloc household and has negotiated with the secretary of a charity for licensed victuallers, moving into one of their almshouses.

There is then another long passage describing how Winnie and Stevie help the old lady pack her bags and ride with her in a hansom cab to her new home (according to the notes, the Licensed Victuallers’ Asylum in Asylum Road, Peckham). This trip is distinguished by Stevie getting very upset at the way the cab driver whips his horse and the cab driver’s rather shamefaced defence of this behaviour.

What is this all about? Well, it’s the start of the novel’s shift to being, not about The Secret Agent but The Secret Agent’s Wife. it’s not only a clever playing with the novel’s timeframes but a switch in its focus. it is the first of a series of chapters in which we see the world from Winnie’s point of view, and get some detail on her feelings for her mother and her brother Stevie. It means that, once her mother is settled in her new cottage, Winnie feels lonely without her in the Verloc home and comes to rely more on Stevie, to think about him more.

I can sympathise with some contemporary critics who wondered why we’re bothering to go in such exquisite detail into the minds and feelings of pretty stupid and pretty insalubrious characters, but this is what the aristocratic and fastidious Conrad wanted to do.

The weeks pass and Winnie carries on feeling more lonely (in the absence of her mother) and more solicitous of Stevie, and also concerned about Verloc who seems to be on edge and anxious all the time. I think we are meant to realise that Winnie’s mother’s departure coincided with Verloc’s meeting with Vladimir and him giving Verloc the ultimatum to do something spectacular.

The effect is to create a dramatic irony in the mind of the reader. We know what’s coming. We have a very strong hunch that Verloc is going to take Stevie to Greenwich Park, with a bomb he’s had the Professor make for him, and commission him with planting it but simple clumsy Stevie is going to trip up and blow himself to smithereens.

So these scenes, as we share Winnie’s feelings for her brother, have a very bleak or tragic effect and this must be the effect Conrad is aiming for. There’s the ‘plot’ – what actually happens – and then there’s how Conrad has arranged it, which is to sidestep all the men he itemised for us in the first part of the book, and shift the whole focus onto poor Winnie.

Stevie goes away

Back in the nitty-gritty of the plot, Verloc suggests that Stevie might like a break from life in Brett Street and so kindly offers to arrange for him to go and stay with Michaelis in the cottage and Kent where the posh lady fan has set him up. Winnie is happy to pack his things and let Verloc take him off.

The two narrative timelines resynchronise

On page 156, a little into chapter 9, the timelines come back together, mesh up, resynchronise, as this digression, Winnie’s timeline, catches up with the ‘main narrative’.

She was alone longer than usual on the day of the attempted bomb outrage in Greenwich Park, because Mr Verloc went out very early that morning and did not come back till nearly dusk.

They mesh up again except that the reader knows (or thinks they know) what happened, namely that Stevie’s been blown to pieces. Which means that, when Verloc returns to the house that evening, every word Winnie utters, no matter how innocent, has a terrible ironic meaning.

The horrible truth: Stevie is dead

Now the reunified narrative picks up pace. Winnie makes dinner for Verloc, who’s come home late. When she asks him where he’s been he blusters, although admitting he’s been to the bank to withdraw all his money, which he’s placed in a pigskin wallet. Why? Because, he tells her, they must flee to the continent.

But he’s still explaining this to a puzzled Winnie when they are surprised by two visitors in quick succession. The first is the Assistant Commissioner himself who insists Verloc go for a walk with him. Shortly afterwards arrives Inspector Heat. Heat is is who produces the fragment of Stevie’s overcoat and shows it to Winnie who recognises it. When she identifies it Heat realises at a stroke that Verloc was the other man the eye witness saw emerge from the Tube and head to the park, Verloc accompanying his simple brother-in-law.

At that moment Verloc re-enters the shop, back from his walk and talk with the Assistant Commissioner. Heat hustles him into the back parlour of the house and shuts the door. Winnie kneels by the door with her ear to the keyhole. And thus she hears her husband confess everything – the plan to blow up the Observatory, obtaining the explosive from the Professor, his taking Stevie and sending him to plant the device, the tragic accident – and her world crashes in ruins around her.

The Assistant Commissioner pays visits

Meanwhile the Assistant Commissioner 1) goes to brief his boss, Sir Etheldred, during which we learned that Verloc has completely confessed to him too, as well as to Heat; 2) goes home, changes then 3) onto a reception given by the lady patron of Michaelis. Here he is introduced to Mr Vladimir. It is a small world – at least it is in books and films which limit the number of characters to the optimum number their audiences can handle.

More importantly, the Assistant Commissioner knows it was Vladimir who intimidated Verloc into commissioning this ridiculous tragedy. Indeed, Vladimir is scaring the posh ladies he likes flirting with by suggesting the Greenwich Park scandal is just the start of a campaign of terror.

When Vladimir leaves the Assistant Commissioner accompanies him and lets him know that Verloc has confessed everything and implicated Vladimir and his embassy. The AC tells him the British authorities want to use it as an excuse to round up all the secret agents and foreign political spies and expel them. In other words, Vladimir and his ilk. Vladimir says no-one will believe the word of such a man in court. The CA isn’t really interested in the court case he just wanted to rattle Vladimir and his rattledness confirms Verloc’s story. Vladimir is the instigator.

Chapter 11

Cut back to Verloc and Winnie at home after Inspector Heat has left. This is a long (28 pages) excruciatingly slow and horrible chapter whose purpose is to contrast the way Verloc more or less dismisses Stevie’s death, regrets Winnie overhearing it all from his and Inspector Heat’s conversation, but now he wants Winnie to pull herself together and wants to make plans. He’ll probably be tried and sent away for two years during which she will have to look after the shop. But then they’ll have to plan what to do on his release, maybe emigrate to America etc.

All this babble is contrasted with the cosmic horror in Winnie’s mind. She only married Verloc because she thought he offered enough money and stability to keep her poor brother safe. All she can think of is that, instead, he walked away with him one fine day in order to murder him. She considers herself utterly released from her marriage, no longer tied in any way to this horrible man, ‘the bargain was at an end’. And so, while Verloc burbles on, blissfully unaware of her complete alienation, of her internal screaming existential crisis, she becomes consumed with the thought of flight.

Throughout the chapter increasing reference is made to the carving knife lying on the table next to the loaf of bread and cold beef which was to form Verloc’s supper. And now, in a trance, Winnie picks it up, walks over to the sofa where Verloc, exhausted, had lain down to rest, and stabs him through the side right into his heart. He barely has time to sigh ‘Don’t’ before he dies.

Chapter 12

Winnie’s shock is slowly penetrated by the sound of Verloc’s blood tick tick ticking from the knife handle onto the floor. Shocked back to her senses she has a vivid premonition of the rope going round her neck as she is hanged, and so fastens her veil and staggers into the street with the vague intention of throwing herself off one of the Thames bridges.

She was alone in London: and the whole town of marvels and mud, with its maze of streets and its mass of lights, was sunk in a hopeless night, rested at the bottom of a black abyss from which no unaided woman could hope to scramble out. (p.218)

Who does she blunder into but Comrade Ossipon. Ossipon is a sensualist and a womaniser. He’s had his eye on Mrs Verloc for some time and is delighted to find her in such a state that he needs to hold her up, steady her, and generally touch and reassure her.

But his thoughts of seduction are quickly overwhelmed by her panic fear, and the whole chapter becomes a a very black joke in miscommunication and misunderstanding. For Ossipon readily falls in with Winnie saying Verloc is dead, because he thinks the person who blew themselves up in Greenwich Park was Ossipon. So he completely misreads Winnie’s repeated wailing that ‘he’s dead, he’s dead’ and then is perplexed when she goes on to say things like ‘he made me do it, he was a devil’ and so on. What is the woman on about?

Ossipon is keen on anything which involves the possibility of seduction but is puzzled and worried when Winnie starts babbling about fleeing the country. but then reassured when she draws out of her dress the pigskin wallet with all the money Verloc had withdrawn from the bank.

He has a brainwave and remembers the Southampton to St Malo ferry which leaves at midnight. they can get a train from Waterloo. But she insists they go back to the shop first, to close the door, and then she insists that a reluctant Ossipon goes inside to turn off the gas lights which she, of course, is horrifiedly reluctant to do. And where he, of course, stumbles across Verloc’s body, dead on the sofa.

He has a panic attack but has barely moved before he realises the woman has come running in from the street and gripped his arms. A policeman is coming! They stand in a frozen embrace as the copper very leisurely strolls up, checks the door, peers through the shop window into the dark interior before finally moving on. It is a scene from a movie. And Winnie hisses in his ear, ‘If he finds me, kill me, Tom, kill me’ such is her panic fear of the gallows.

And now in the darkness she explains why she murdered Verloc, for taking away her boy and blowing him up, and a great lightbulb goes on in Ossipon’s head. So the blown up body in the park wasn’t Verloc, it was her simple brother. And Verloc was responsible. And so she killed him.

Now, in words which must have been scandalous for the time, she begs him to take her away, to escape England: she’ll be his slave, she’ll adore him, she’ll do anything for him, he won’t even have to marry her. She falls to the floor and grips his legs and, in his mortal terror of her, Ossipon fancies her a snake, an angel of death. They’re both completely hysterical. For a moment, there in the dark, it crosses Ossipon’s mind to strangle her and be free.

But the moment passes and instead they go out and hail a cab to take them to the station. Here Ossipon instructs her to buy a ticket and enter the train by herself, he being known to the police and accompanying her would trigger alarm bells.

Her hysteria and his panic are vividly conveyed in a way which made me tenser, more uptight than at many a movie thriller I’ve seen. They enter a compartment of the train and sit waiting for it to depart, her weeping copiously and blessing him as her ‘saviour’, him wondering what the devil he’s got himself into.

Finally, finally the train starts to move off and even as Winnie continues tearfully thanking him as her saviour and promising to serve him all her days, he takes a few strides, opens the carriage door and jumps out, flinging the door closed behind him.

Something is required artistically, to round off the mad series of events following Verloc’s murder and Conrad makes the maybe obvious, maybe stylish decision to let the train pull out and leave without a word, and gives us nothing of Winnie’s response, no words, no thoughts, nothing about her at all, leaving the reader to imagine her horror and despair.

Instead Conrad has a couple of pages describing how Ossipon walks walks walks all night long the length and breadth of central London, walking off the trauma and shock and horror and fear and confusion he has just experienced until finally, at dawn, he enters his cheap digs, collapses on the bed and falls asleep.

Chapter 13

Cut to a completely different scene. We really are never going to hear more of Winnie Verloc. Instead we are in the Professor’s bare garret where Ossipon has paid him a visit. The Professor is describing a visit of his own to Michaelis’s rural cottage and ridiculing the ‘book’ he is writing for its sentimental thick-headedness. Michaelis witters on about creating an ideal world in which the strong will tend to the weak. Hah! says the Professor.

‘The weak! The source of all evil on this earth!… I told him that I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination.’

And they catch a bus to the Silenus, the bar where we first met them drinking and arguing about radical politics. But the Professor isn’t a radical, he’s a nihilist.

‘What’s the good of thinking of what will be!’ He raised his glass. ‘To the destruction of what is,’ he said calmly. (p.245)

But Ossipon isn’t listening. He has in his jacket pocket the press report of a mystery woman who went aboard a Channel ferry, was spotted by several ship staff wandering looking lost and ill. Who was questioned by staff who went to get help and when they got back she was gone, presumed jumped over the side. So that was the end of Winnie Verloc.

But it isn’t the end of the consequences. Because ever since he read it Ossipon has lost his natural joie de vivre and his easy success with women. he radiated health and vitality which seduced no end of women but now his words come haltingly, he embarrasses them, he has lost his seductive powers. He asks the professor for his help but the gnome-like Professor is no use, tells him he is a mediocrity in an age destroyed by mediocrity, bids farewell and leaves.

Ossipon stumbles out into the daylight a broken man. He’s not going to keep the date he has with a likely prospect (‘an elderly nursery governess putting her trust in his Apollo-like ambrosial head’), he has lost all his lust for life. he likes drinking now, drinking to forget, drinking to head towards a future of alcoholism and vagabond ruin. He is the moral casualty left behind by the squalid little Verloc affair.

But the last word is given to Conrad’s spooky description of the Professor, in suitably ominous, threatening tones. I imagine a black and white movie ending with huge end credits and melodramatic Hollywood music.

And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men. (p.248)

Minor characters

One of the things which makes ‘The Secret Agent’ such a chewy and rewarding read is the depth and care Conrad gives to even minor characters. Everybody who comes onstage is given some thought and analysis:

The Italian waiter in the Italian restaurant where the Assistant Commissioner stops for a cheap dinner, who, when the latter pays, is divided between counting the silver coins and eyeing up the pretty young woman who’s just leaving. (p.125)

The cabman with his ‘fierce little eyes’, who takes Winnie’s mother to the almshouse, and even more so the cabby’s horse, are treated to an extended description (pages 130 to 142).

Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared unduly elevated by the effect of emaciation. The little stiff tail seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the other end the thin, flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse-hide, drooped to the ground under the weight of an enormous bony head. The ears hung at different angles, negligently; and the macabre figure of that mute dweller on the earth steamed straight up from ribs and backbone in the muggy stillness of the air.

The secretary of the charity who bends the rules to grant Winnie’s mother her alms cottage is given a paragraph or more to fill out his character (p.134).

Mrs Neale who cleans for the Verloc’s is given several pages:

Victim of her marriage with a debauched joiner, she was oppressed by the needs of many infant children. Red-armed, and aproned in coarse sacking up to the arm-pits, she exhaled the anguish of the poor in a breath of soap-suds and rum, in the uproar of scrubbing, in the clatter of tin pails. (p.150)

Revolutionary arguments

Yundt, Michaelis, Ossipon and the Professor are made to represent different flavours or strands of revolutionary thought and Conrad presents extensive conversations in which they articulate and debate their points of view.

Michaelis is the most articulate and he expresses 100% pure Marxism:

‘The future is as certain as the past – slavery, feudalism, individualism, collectivism.’ He saw Capitalism doomed in its cradle, born with the poison of the principle of competition in its system. The great capitalists devouring the little capitalists, concentrating the power and the tools of production in great masses, perfecting industrial processes, and in the madness of self-aggrandisement only preparing, organising, enriching, making ready the lawful inheritance of the suffering proletariat.

By contrast, the Professor is placed in a dialogue with Comrade Ossipon in which he is given very powerful critique of the professional revolutionaries for their smug complacency, and the Professor’s insistence on destruction for its own sake. The Professor accuses Ossipon and his ilk of being mirror images of the society they claim to want to overthrow, which shapes and limits them. They are its slaves.

‘You revolutionists… are the slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence of that convention. Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionise it. It governs your thought, of course, and your action too, and thus neither your thought nor your action can ever be conclusive… You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed against you – than the police, for instance… The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality – counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical…’ (p.64)

By contrast with this comfortable arrangement, the Professor wants to blow up society, erase and destroy it.

The influence of Dickens

I read a lot of Conrad as a student and when I came to ‘The Secret Agent’ I was struck by the flavour of Charles Dickens in a lot of the descriptions. Not just of the fog and damp of London which is, after all, in Sherlock Holmes and umpteen other late Victorian texts, but something more animated and alive.

He advanced at once into an immensity of greasy slime and damp plaster interspersed with lamps, and enveloped, oppressed, penetrated, choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night, which is composed of soot and drops of water. (p.126)

What’s more specifically Dickensian is giving inanimate objects such as houses, or parts of people’s anatomy or physiology, a humorous life of their own.

Sir Ethelred opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which [his] hooked nose seemed anxious to peer; there came from it a subdued rolling sound, as from a distant organ with the scornful indignation stop. (p.117)

All was so still without and within that the lonely ticking of the clock on the landing stole into the room as if for the sake of company.

Striking a match on the box she held in her hand, she turned on and lighted, above the parlour table, one of the two gas-burners, which, being defective, first whistled as if astonished, and then went on purring comfortably like a cat.

Mr Verloc obeyed woodenly, stony-eyed, and like an automaton whose face had been painted red. (p.162)

A thick police constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if he too were part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a lamp-post, took not the slightest notice of Mr Verloc.

Also, for anyone who’s read ‘Bleak House’, Conrad’s Chief Inspector Heat brings echoes of Dickens’s Inspector Bucket.

And names, Dickens was a genius at naming his characters which is why so many remain part of popular culture (Oliver Twist, Scrooge). Verloc, Ossipon and so on are not particularly great names, but when I came across the assistant to the Secretary of State and found his name was Toodles this rang a big bell. Toodles is the name of the warm and generous family in ‘Dombey and Son’.

Conrad’s cosmic imagery

As I’ve pointed out in all my Conrad reviews, all his stories contain a sprinkling of similes or descriptions which lift off from the present banal situation and suddenly see everything from a cosmic perspective, suddenly drawing comparisons with the entire earth, the human race, the universe, all space and time and so on.

Down below in the quiet, narrow street measured footsteps approached the house, then died away unhurried and firm, as if the passer-by had started to pace out all eternity, from gas-lamp to gas-lamp in a night without end… (p.55)

His wisdom was of an official kind, or else he might have reflected upon a matter not of theory but of experience that in the close-woven stuff of relations between conspirator and police there occur unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden holes in space and time. (p.76)

All the inhabitants of the immense town, the population of the whole country, and even the teeming millions struggling upon the planet, were with him. (p.85)

The Assistant Commissioner remembered very well the conversation between these two. He had listened in silence. It was something as exciting in a way, and even touching in its foredoomed futility, as the efforts at moral intercourse between the inhabitants of remote planets. (p.94)

She kept still as the population of half the globe would keep still in astonishment and despair, were the sun suddenly put out in the summer sky by the perfidy of a trusted providence. (p.198)

Vivid images

Conrad has a knack of knocking out, every now and then, startlingly vivid and unexpected images.

The Assistant Commissioner’s delivery was leisurely, as it were cautious. His thought seemed to rest poised on a word before passing to another, as though words had been the stepping-stones for his intellect picking its way across the waters of error. (p.86)

He led a cortege of dismal thoughts along dark streets, through lighted streets, in and out of two flash bars, as if in a half-hearted attempt to make a night of it, and finally back again to his menaced home, where he sat down fatigued behind the counter, and they crowded urgently round him, like a pack of hungry black hounds.

Mr Verloc went on divesting himself of his clothing with the unnoticing inward concentration of a man undressing in the solitude of a vast and hopeless desert.

Something wild and doubtful in his expression made it appear uncertain whether he meant to strangle or to embrace his wife.

Sometimes clunky

Conrad handles the English language with the fearlessness of an outsider. Very often this results in sentences and whole paragraphs of vivid power, long, loquacious, studded with unusual words or phrasing. But now and then the same preparedness to experiment and find new expression drives him over the edge into a kind of rule-breaking clunkiness – although this, like everything else about Conrad, is still interesting and entertaining.

He was strong in his integrity of a good detective, but he saw now that an impenetrably attentive reserve towards this incident would have served his reputation better. (p.77)

All the time his trained faculties of an excellent investigator, who scorns no chance of information, followed the self-satisfied, disjointed loquacity of the constable. (p.79)

That singed piece of cloth was incredibly valuable, and he could not defend himself from astonishment at the casual manner it had come into his possession. (p.80)

Somehow it’s as if the effort to make his prose closer to a more functional detective style, at the same time reveals its occasional oddity and boniness. It also brings out the French in him.

French word order

Conrad was Polish and like lots of boys of his class was taught French as his primary foreign language. He lived for a while in Paris and was fluent in the language long before he began picking up English and, I would argue, it shows. I think this French tinge to his thinking comes out mostly in placing adjectives and adverbs and adverbial phrases after rather than before the nouns or verbs they refer to.

He turned no longer his back to the room.

The stranger gave her again a silent smile.

‘I’ve heard of him,’ whispered uneasily Mr Verloc.

Mrs Verloc adjusted nicely in its place a small cardboard box… (p.167)

‘He’s been frightening me,’ declared suddenly the lady who sat by the side of Mr Vladimir…

All of these are against traditional English word order. As Hugh Epstein writes, in the notes to the Wordsworth Classics edition, ‘Conrad’s translations from French occasionally interfere with idiomatic English’ to which I would add ‘occasionally’? Conrad’s often Frenchified word order is one of the reasons his prose style is often described as ‘exotic’.

Animal imagery

The use of animal imagery to dehumanise characters, by implication to compare all the characters to dumb beasts, is not particularly Dickensian. In fact Conrad did it earlier in ‘Amy Foster where he compares the emigrant husband, and his baby son, to birds caught in a snare. It’s a kind of anti-humanistic tactic but one he uses extensively in ‘The Secret Agent’.

Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not particularly fond of animals may give to his wife’s beloved cat.

Mr Verloc called aloud to the boy, in the spirit, no doubt, in which a man invites the attendance of the household dog…

Stevie prowled round the table like an excited animal in a cage.

Mr Verloc’s immobility by the side of the arm-chair resembled a state of collapsed coma — a sort of passive insensibility interrupted by slight convulsive starts, such as may be observed in the domestic dog having a nightmare on the hearthrug.

‘When he heard me scraping the ground with it he leaned his forehead against a tree, and was as sick as a dog.’

Chief Inspector Heat, though what is called a man, was not a smiling animal.

The perfect anarchist was not recognised as a fellow-creature by Chief Inspector Heat. He was impossible — a mad dog to be left alone.

On all fours amongst the puddles, wet and begrimed, like a sort of amphibious and domestic animal living in ash-bins and dirty water, [Mrs Neale] uttered the usual exordium.

Stevie moped in the striking fashion of an unhappy domestic animal.

Mr Verloc felt this difficulty acutely. He turned around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large animal in a cage.

‘The Embassy,’ Mr Verloc began again, after a preliminary grimace which bared his teeth wolfishly. (p.198)

He paused, and a snarl lifting his moustaches above a gleam of white teeth gave him the expression of a reflective beast, not very dangerous — a slow beast with a sleek head, gloomier than a seal. (p.208)

He felt her now clinging round his legs, and his terror reached its culminating point, became a sort of intoxication, entertained delusions, acquired the characteristics of delirium tremens. He positively saw snakes now. He saw the woman twined round him like a snake, not to be shaken off. (p.234)

The Russian character

It seems to be generally agreed that the unnamed foreign power paying Verloc is Russia – Vladimir is the founding ruler of the Russian Orthodox Church and Verloc visits an embassy in ‘Chesham Square’, the Russian Embassy was in Chesham Place – so it is generally assumed that Vladimir, the suave commissioner of this terrorist attack, is Russian. No change there, then.

As a Pole, whose nation had for centuries oppressed by the Russians, Conrad gives an inevitably negative account of the Russian character, with its centuries-old tradition of illiberal, autocratic, repressiiveness

Descended from generations victimised by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience. He was born to it. (p.183)

Thoughts

I disagree with the critics quoted on the paperback blurb, in the introduction and the Wikipedia article, who claim this is a great political novel or even, ludicrously, the greatest novel about terrorism ever written. It’s obviously nothing of the sort. The little cohort of revolutionists described here are more like cartoon comedy figures than the terrorist groups of the world I grew up in – the PLO, the IRA, the Baader-Meinhof group, more recently al-Qaeda and all its franchises and affiliates.

Slothful Verloc and his shop of seedy photos and his moany mother-in-law are more the stuff of a comic novel (if Conrad could do genuine comedy), as is the long peculiar passage about taking the mother by cab to Peckham.

The central event of sending an idiot boy to plant a bomb which he trips over and detonates by accident has no meaning or significance, is simply sad and squalid, Viewed from a different angle it has a Keystone Cops slapstick element about it.

Even the ‘arguments’ between the revolutionists are moderately interesting but feel like they’ve been tacked on as required by the nominal subject matter, and mostly amount to ad hominem abuse of each other. There’s none of the intellectual clarity and incisiveness you get from, for example, something like Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Dirty Hands.

The machinations of the foreign embassy manipulator Mr Vladimir have the quaint home-made feeling of a character from The Prisoner of Zenda or a Sherlock Holmes story.

The entire thing lacks the sense of real threat you only really begin to get in fiction following the First World War, which transformed the world into a much more dangerous and threatening place. None of these people is a threat, they’re harmless jokes.

In any case, the entire earlier parts of the book are entirely overshadowed by the final two chapters which are harrowing in the extreme; everything else – Vladimir’s threats, Verloc’s pathetic career, Ossipon and Michaelis and Yundt’s pointless bickering – are just foreplay for the big event, which is the searingly tragic impact on Winnie of finding out about Stevie’s death.

That chapter is unstoppable, unput-downable, her terrible grief gripped me by the throat, and then rolled on into the long sequence of events with Ossipon which carry you like a rollercoaster to the bitter end of the text.

It’s odd that liberal critics – and Conrad himself in his dull prefaces – go on about ‘morality’ and ‘moral choices’ and so on, as if this is what Conrad’s fiction is about, when what so many of his stories actually convey, with nerve-flaying power, is the horror and futility of existence. Everybody quotes Kurtz’s final phrase in ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘The horror, the horror’, mainly because it’s so short and quotable, but the final two chapters of ‘The Secret Agent’ should be up there alongside ‘Heart of Darkness’ as one of the most nerve-shredding, intense and psychologically horrifying passages in literature.

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Credit

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1902. Page references are to the 1975 Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition.

Related links

• The Secret Agent online
• The Conrad Society

Conrad reviews

• Joseph Conrad reviews