Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent
Don’t read this book unless you enjoy watching the sad delusions of miserable revolutionists get crushed mercilessly by the realities of life.
After reading Heart of Darkness, I am tempted to put Joseph Conrad on my short list of greatest fiction writers ever, up there with Kipling and Tolstoy. My next two Joseph Conrad books were Chance (1913) and then The Secret Agent (1907), mostly because I could get those two for free on my Audible subscription. Now I’m on to Nostromo. It is a joy to listen to because of the vivid language and poetic style, but I’m not far enough into it to say much more about it yet.
Both Chance and The Secret Agent were very well done. Chance was mostly light (at least for Conrad) and enjoyable, with a satisfying resolution. Basically a romance. The Secret Agent was the opposite - heavy and miserable throughout.
It’s interesting. The only explanation for the existence of The Secret Agent is that Conrad was a time traveler. He saw in the future all these people watching James Bond movies with a dashing womanizing secret agent, exciting explosions, daring escapes, and intriguing criminal mastermind villains plotting to destroy the world. He saw all this and shook his head at the pathetic romanticization of what is in reality of course a tawdry and dirty business.
Conrad then set out to correct the record, one by one deconstructing all the tropes through an encounter with dismal reality. The Secret Agent contains a dashing womanizing secret agent! Explosions! Daring escapes! Clandestine meetings! An intriguing criminal mastermind! But unlike Hollywood, Conrad goes the extra mile to make it all feel pedantic and depressing. I would describe the aesthetic of the novel as a slow motion train-wreck in which the train is pulling 10 or 15 dumpster fires, each of which gets a deep psychological profile as it flies off the tracks of life in a flaming agony of despair.
Since you (if you take my advice) are not going to read the novel, I will give you a spoilers-heavy synopsis. What I won’t be able to convey in this format, however, is the slow-paced and deliberate brooding heaviness of the novel at every step.
The plot centers on an anarchist cell in London in the late 19th century. The perspective jumps 4 or 5 times, so we get bits of the story through different characters. As a result the protagonist is everyone and no one, but I guess it works because none of the characters are very likable anyway.
In a couple of occasions Conrad makes a point about how these anarchists are treated by society. Despite the fact that they are trying to overthrow the structures of civilization, they are tolerated, even protected for political reasons. One convict among them has become a cause célèbre among the criminal justice reforming progressive elite of London. Funny how little has changed in 100 years. I get the sense that Joseph Conrad, like conservatives of our day, was frustrated by the situation.
We start with Mr. Verloc the secret agent, actually double agent in the pay of a foreign embassy as an informant and also an informant for the London chief inspector. In reality he has no true allegiance to either side. He is just lazy and prefers the easy pay of an informant over putting in a hard days work. “For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state [conventional respectability], but against the price which must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly.”
But a new ambassador gives him a shock when he tells Verloc to quit messing around with this informant business and go blow something up already! Specifically starting with the Greenwich Observatory because “the fetish of the hour … is neither royalty nor religion. … The demonstration must be against learning—science. But not every science will do. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy. Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics.” Science as the new religion; again, little has changed in 100 years.
Disturbed at the idea of such an action but unwilling to give up the easy money, Verloc sets out to fulfill his mandate and that sets the plot in motion.
Verloc consults with the criminal mastermind Professor to get the bomb. The Professor, in order to overcome his insecurities carries on his person at all times enough explosives to create a 200 foot blast at any moment. He knows the police are aware of this, which gives him a feeling of power. He walks around with fist always enclosed around the detonator.
Anyway, The Professor gives Verloc a bomb disguised as a paint can. Unfortunately, the bomb detonates early and blows up Verloc’s mentally handicapped brother-in-law who was groomed to do the dirty work of delivering the weapon.
At this point the perspective shifts a time or two and the details of the accident unravel slowly. This part of the plot feels the most like a slow-motion train wreck since we know right away that the bomb misfired and someone died, but the author takes us step by step through the slow process of learning all the details of the true nature of the disaster.
As the plot gets back to Verloc we find that he has a few things to explain to his wife who was not in the loop on the secret agent business, and who has just learned that her husband caused the death of her beloved brother. Verloc finally starts to come clean to his wife, and I really thought for a moment we would see a redemption arc for him. But that is not where the author wanted to go.
Instead, Verloc unwittingly bungles the domestic scene and his angry wife unexpectedly kills him with a kitchen knife. In a panic she decides to attach herself to and run off with her late husband’s friend Ossipon, the dashing anarchist womanizer. Ossipon gets on a train to Paris with her, but realizing that she has a screw loose he makes a daring escape. Yes, he literally jumps from a moving train just as if it were a James Bond action sequence, to escape the caressing clutches of a too-clingy woman. Ossipon keeps her money of course - his womanizing is mostly about conning cash from elderly ladies to fund his anarchist lifestyle.
Ossipon later reads about the woman’s suicide in the newspapers and is deeply shaken. The novel just ends there, with Ossipon “marching in the gutter as if in training for the task of an inevitable future. … Comrade Ossipon walked without looking where he put his feet, feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, hearing not a sound.” As for the Professor, “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.”
Lesson learned: don’t be a nihilist. Even if the world isn’t perfect your efforts to tear down the conventional morality can and will make things worse. Just don’t do it, ok. Also, don’t be a secret agent. It’s dreary and complicated. Also, don’t read this book! …unless you enjoy watching the sad delusions of miserable revolutionists get crushed mercilessly by the realities of life.
I’m trying to decide whether the depressing tone of this novel lowers my overall evaluation of Joseph Conrad, but I don’t think so. … Next time I’ll comment more on the relatively more upbeat Chance.