Just Finished Reading: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (FP: 1907)

Vladamir Verloc has been operating in London as a secret agent for a foreign power. In that time he has given political speeches, helped support fellow anarchists and sent the occasional bomb treat warning to the authorities. From time to time he has compiled reports about the social and political environment and returned these to his masters. In other words he has taken money and accomplished nothing. When a new ‘handler’ is appointed at the foreign embassy all this will changed. Dressed down for his ineffectiveness for so long he is ordered to arrange an incident, a dynamic outrage, which will incense public opinion and lead to political repression. He is ordered to attack a seemingly random target – Greenwich Observatory, the home of British scientific endeavour. Thrown into turmoil at this sudden demand for action Verloc’s carefully constructed life starts to spin out of control changing the lives of everyone around him.

I found this to be a very odd book indeed. Written at the turn of the 20th century it’s about the lives of a group of terrorists living and operating in London. Although I had some appreciation that such people – often derided as ‘anarchist bomb throwers’ – existed at the edges of European and even American society I had no idea that they were as prominent as to have novels written about them. Feeling sometimes very modern and at other times rather antiquated it was almost as if the author had deliberately set a modern plot in an Edwardian setting. It almost, but not quite, had a weird Science-Fiction feel to it as if present day terrorists had been transported back in time to do what they do best – terrorise. But of course, it was nothing like that. Conrad was writing (obviously) without any foreknowledge of terrorist acts to come both at home and abroad. He was writing from the view of contemporary terrorists that were the source of daily newspaper reports including the one that he based this story on – an explosion outside Greenwich Observatory some years before he put pen to paper to tell this story.

Whilst rather slow in places this was an interesting tale of what happens when someone is expected, indeed forced, to live up to his reputation no matter the consequences. Verloc is a well-drawn and fairly complex character but it is really his wife that becomes the centre of the piece. Fanatically devoted to her ‘slow’ younger brother she reacts violently to her husband’s use of him in his terrorist activities. Whilst not exactly ‘one of the greatest novels of the 20th century’ as it says on the back of my edition of the book it is an intriguing portrayal of an early 20th century terrorist cell and a sometimes biting satire of the society in which it operates. Recommended.