The Secret Agent

The Ironist’s London

Joseph Conrad called The Secret Agent “an ironic tale,” and the irony is structural as well as tonal: every character in the novel is working against their stated purposes, every political position is compromised, every act of apparent principle is underwritten by a different and baser motive. The result is a political novel that does not have a political position — not because it is neutral but because it finds every available position corrupt.

The novel is set in Conrad’s London — a specific, grey, fog-wrapped city of small shops, cramped domestic interiors, and the persistent smell of cooked food. This is not the London of Dickens’s social sympathy or the London of Victorian romance but a city of claustrophobia and diminished expectation, where the agent Verloc keeps his pornographic bookshop and his wife and her brother Stevie and waits for instructions from the Russian embassy.

The Greenwich Bomb

The plot is set in motion when Verloc’s Russian handler informs him that the policy of tolerating London’s revolutionary exiles must end: he is to commit an act of outrage — specifically, the bombing of the Greenwich Observatory — that will be blamed on foreign anarchists and justify crackdowns on radical organisations across Europe. The Greenwich Observatory is chosen because it is the symbolic centre of scientific progress, the location of the prime meridian, the node of the global time-keeping system: to bomb it is to attack the idea of rational, measurable civilisation.

Conrad based this on a real event: the 1894 Greenwich bomb, in which a French anarchist accidentally detonated his device at Greenwich park, killing only himself. The actual event was as absurd as Conrad’s fictional version; what Conrad adds is the machinery behind it — the state actors who instigated it, the institutional incompetence that produced the accidental victim.

Stevie

The novel’s moral centre, such as it is, is Stevie: Verloc’s wife’s brother, a young man of limited intellectual capacity who responds to suffering with pure emotional directness. He is anguished by cruelty to animals, by poverty, by the sight of people in pain. He does not have the intellectual architecture to contain his responses within political ideology; he simply feels what is happening.

Conrad places Stevie at the centre of the plot’s catastrophe — he is the accidental victim of the operation Verloc has been ordered to carry out — and the effect is to indict every political position simultaneously. The state actors who ordered the bombing, the anarchists who are supposed to be blamed for it, the liberal reformers who will respond to it: all are implicated in Stevie’s death, and none of them can claim his quality of straightforward moral response.

The Black Comedy

The anarchist circle that surrounds Verloc — including the sinister Professor who walks London’s streets with a bomb detonator in his pocket, prepared to blow himself up rather than be captured — is handled with genuine satirical intelligence. These are not romantic revolutionaries but petty men of inflated self-conception, sustained by the state’s need for them as a permanent threat. Conrad was prescient about the symbiotic relationship between political extremism and state security: the terrorist and the secret policeman need each other.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Conrad’s most formally controlled novel, The Secret Agent uses its political thriller machinery to demonstrate that every act of political violence has sponsors who keep their distance from the consequences.