Joseph Conrad

Conrad himself called Nostromo the "most anxiously meditated" of his novels, a book that carries its indirection with a kind of stately grandeur. The Secret Agent appears, in comparison, to deserve its subtitle: "A Simple Tale." But no: it is rather one that hides its difficulties behind a mask of streamlined assurance. Conrad described the book as both a "new departure in genre" and his "first story . . . dealing with London," but he also wrote of it dismissively as a kind of tour de force, "a sustained effort in ironical treatment of a melodramatic subject." Nevertheless he prepared for it carefully, making a close study of London's anarchist milieu and of the actual 1894 explosion from which he drew his plot. Conrad devotes much of the novel to a taxonomy of different revolutionary types, from the bomb-making Professor to the wheezy "ticket-of-leave apostle" Michaelis. Yet that is not what gives the book its edge. Soon after finishing Nostromo he had written an essay called "Autocracy and War," an examination of the Russian empire that one reviewer described as "condemnation in the form of rhapsody," and its masterly invective would seem to have determined the subject of both The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Conrad may direct an unforgiving stare at his anarchists. What drives The Secret Agent, however, is not its analysis of the disturbance they themselves produce, but rather its account of the disorder sparked by the attempt of a "senseless tyranny" to control them.

The novel opens in the Soho shop of Adolf Verloc, a place with "photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls" in the window and the gas jets turned low, "either for economy's sake or for the sake of the customers." Though Mr. Verloc's business is but his "ostensible business." The real work happens in the house behind, where he meets the anarchists among whom he passes as one of themselves, gathering what information he can for the foreign government that employs him. He is an indolent creature, "constitutionally averse from every superfluous exercise," but now that indolence receives a challenge. His masters want him to earn his keep, to do something that will provoke "a universal repressive legislation."

The book's opening chapters walk us through Verloc's grimy duplicitous world, and then the novel skips forward to the day of an "attempted bomb outrage in Greenwich Park," an explosion in which only the bomber himself has perished. But then Conrad dives back in time, back into Verloc's family life: a life that includes not only his wife, Winnie, but also her beloved brother Stevie, a "sensitive" boy marked by "the vacant droop of his lower lip." That violation of chronology allows Conrad to defer the novel's climax, and yet it does something more than turn the screws of suspense. For it tells us, too, of the hopes that Winnie has placed in Verloc's apparent kindliness. Those hopes would mean little to a reader in their proper sequence, but they assume an enormous retrospective importance; as so often in Conrad, we need the end of the story to make sense of its beginning. Breaking sequence lets Conrad establish the terms on which The Secret Agent will conclude by making us understand that, as one policeman will put it, "From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama," a household tragedy embedded within a tale of political terror.