This is by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdichev, which had once been Polish, was then part of the Russian empire, and is now located in Ukraine, his first language was Polish (English was his third, which is pretty amazing...)

It's a long time since I read any of his work (just over 10 years, actually, when Heart of Darkness became the first book ever that I read on a mobile phone...).

This one was published in 1907. It's subtitled A Simple Tale (though it's anything but); and it's dedicated to H.G. Wells. My audio-version was superbly read by David Threlfall.

I found it a little difficult to get into. At the beginning it's all very opaque. We have the strange Mr Verloc, who runs a mysterious shop (some turn-of-the-century porno joint), and disappears off on unexplained jaunts to the "Continent". He's married to Winnie, who makes a speciality of not looking too hard into things. As part of the deal, his marriage also made him responsible for Winnie's mother and Stevie, Winnie's brother, who suffers from some sort of learning difficulty.

Early on in the piece, we see Mr Verloc (he's always referred to like this) visiting an unidentified embassy (presumably Russian). He's obviously doing some under-the-table work for them, and his new boss, Mr Vladimir, is far from satisfied with his performance. He wants to see some sort of destructive action that will make the British government see sense, and get on with the clamping down that Mr Vladimir's government has been calling for.

Then we meet a few of Mr Verloc's associates, blow-hards all of them, variously seeing themselves as idealists, terrorists, or socialists. Later, we meet another. This one, nicknamed the Professor, does more than talk: He's a bomb-maker.

It's all, as I say, a little fuzzy. But then, when someone is accidentally blown up, by the bomb acquired by Mr Verloc to keep his embassy lords and masters happy, the plot really takes off.


Windows frequently feature in the text

Just to fill in the fuzzy bits before we go further: Arnold E. Davidson sums up our key protagonist admirably: "Verloc pretends to be a full-fledged member in the small local society of socialists, revolutionaries, and anarchists so that he can secretly be an informer for the London police and an agent provocateur for the reactionary Czarist government." The anarchists, meanwhile, says David Mulry, are "complete humbugs"... (Sarah Wise notes that they are composites drawing on various historical figures. But she also tells us that Conrad's "sour view of political agitators" is at odds with the descriptions of a detective sergeant who wrote up his memories of those times: "I am certain," he wrote, "that although the Anarchists talked wildly and advocated schemes that seemed utterly impracticable to the ordinary observer, they were all quiet and peaceful men, and well disposed to their fellow creatures in general." Conrad's views, says Wise, derive from the activities of his father, a Polish revolutionary and patriot whose activities in opposition to Russian rule had resulted in the family's exile.)

Anyway, moving on... Stevie is the apple of his mother's and sister's eye. It's for his sake that Winnie marries Mr Verloc. (She, we learn later, suffered at the hands of a violent father, and lost her real love because his family didn't consider her good enough. So she's had a tough life, has Winnie.) It's for Stevie's sake, too, that his mother eventually moves out of the little Verloc menage, feeling that one burden will be easier than two for the esteemed shopkeeper to keep bearing. Stevie is a kind, sensitive young man, though easily led. He -- unlike the anarchists, ironically, whose glorious goals allow little respect for actual flesh-and-blood human beings -- genuinely empathizes with the poor and downtrodden, and hates to see cruelty of any description.

He has been taught by his mother and sister to look up to Mr Verloc, so it's easy for the latter -- unable to find anyone else to take part in this hare-brained scheme -- to manipulate his brother-in-law into planting the bomb. What is not in the plan, however, is for Stevie to stumble, and blow himself up so convincingly that he has to be gathered up with a shovel. Because the bomber's body is so utterly destroyed, Verloc's associates initially think he is the one who died. But an astute police officer notices the address label that Winnie -- fearful her brother will get lost in the city -- has sewn into his coat.

The police are not particularly trustworthy figures either, however. They all have their axe to grind, and their interests to protect. Mulry again: "Conrad's London is more unsettling than Dickens's and more apt, perhaps, to shock the reader with its brutality. In fact, the ruthlessness of the politicians, the complacency of the upper classes, the complicity of the police, the very unfolding of the plot itself reinforces the anarchist vision of the world rather than attempting to debunk or discredit it."


I can imagine this gracing the apartments of Sir Ethelred, a high-ranking politician who abhors "detail"

When Winnie hears of her brother's death (major spoilers ahead), she surmises that Mr Verloc callously "took the boy away from his home to murder him". And when he sits there on the sofa, plotting a future of virtual impunity (guaranteed, he thinks, by his capacity to spill various consignments of inconvenient beans), and palming off the responsibility for Stevie's misfortune onto her, Winnie can take no more, and kills him with the carving knife...

Almost immediately, however, a terrible fear of the gallows grips her. She stumbles out of the house -- and into the arms of Comrade Ossipon, one of the anarchists we met earlier. She hopes he will rescue her, but he is thoroughly spooked by the murder she has committed, and terribly tempted by the money he now knows she is carrying. He pretends to be carrying her off to safety in France, but bails at the last minute, leaving her on the boat train alone. She commits suicide during the sea passage.

The last chapters are haunted by recurrent refrains. Winnie remembers accounts of hangings ("The drop given was fourteen feet..."); Comrade Ossipon cannot shake off phrases from the newspaper report of Winnie's suicide ("An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair...").

So, after what was for me a difficult beginning (not totally seeing where everyone fitted in, and not really liking any of them either), this became a gripping, atmospheric, thoroughly thought-provoking listen.



The story is based on a real incident that took place in 1894. A 26-year-old man named Martial Bourdin was found fatally injured while transporting a bomb across Greenwich Park. A couple of throwaway comments from Conrad's friend Ford Madox Ford (now why haven't I read anything by him...?) inspires the whole edifice of the story.

Writing in 2005, Tom Reiss maintains that the book "has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age. Conrad's villain, the Professor, who never goes out without a glass vial of high explosives in his breast pocket and a detonator in his palm, has been taken to be a prescient portrait of the terrorists who menace our own world."

Certainly, this is the character with whom we end. Verloc's dead. And Winnie. And poor Stevie. Ossipon walks, haunted, without goal or awareness. "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."

But The Secret Agent, Reiss contends, "is essentially a satire of British and European attitudes toward terrorism and counterterrorism, [and] the real evil of the novel emerges from the exigencies of counterterrorism, not the anarchist plotting itself". While The Secret Agent "remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside," Under Western Eyes, which came four years later, he maintains, is the Conrad that gives us a deeper perspective. (I read that a long time ago. Maybe time for a revisit...)

Not all would agree, however. Will Self, writing in 2019, describes The Secret Agent as "the perfect novel for our time". And Maya Jasanoff, pointing out that Conrad's subject matter consistently "grappled with the ethical ramifications of living in a globalised world", argues that works such as The Secret Agent "foresaw the dark heart of Brexit Britain".



Both sides of the argument have their merits, but somehow it's the personal that really stands out in this novel, rather than the political. What little coincidences and misunderstandings and accidents our lives are made up of... If only Stevie hadn't tripped... If only Mr Verloc hadn't been so convinced he was actually loved, and hadn't, on that basis, tried to sketch out a post-bomb future for himself and Winnie... If only Winnie hadn't been so lacking in curiosity... If only Winnie's mother hadn't generously moved out, and had been there to keep an eye on things... If only people all across the political spectrum were a bit more self-discerning. As Conrad remarks: "The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds."

Nor can you deny that Conrad has a way with words. Mrs Neale, the charwoman: "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..." London in the dark: "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."

All up, I think my last completed book of the year has been a good one.