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Summary
Summary
'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.'Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'A Simple Tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery.
Author Notes
Joseph Conrad is recognized as one of the 20th century's greatest English language novelists.
He was born Jozef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. His father, a writer and translator, was from Polish nobility, but political activity against Russian oppression led to his exile. Conrad was orphaned at a young age and subsequently raised by his uncle.
At 17 he went to sea, an experience that shaped the bleak view of human nature which he expressed in his fiction. In such works as Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), and Nostromo (1904), Conrad depicts individuals thrust by circumstances beyond their control into moral and emotional dilemmas. His novel Heart of Darkness (1902), perhaps his best known and most influential work, narrates a literal journey to the center of the African jungle. This novel inspired the acclaimed motion picture Apocalypse Now.
After the publication of his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), Conrad gave up the sea. He produced thirteen novels, two volumes of memoirs, and twenty-eight short stories. He died on August 3, 1924, in England.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
As Conrad's 1907 novel screens, Mark Lawson hails a prescient masterpiece that has shaped depictions of terrorism and espionage As they watch a suicide bomber with explosives strapped to his chest walk through a London that feels on the brink of political collapse, some viewers may suspect that the new TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent, has been tweaked to maximise contemporary relevance. Those elements, though, are in the original, making the BBC1 three-parter -- with Toby Jones as Verloc, an anarchist who becomes involved in a plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory -- the latest example of Conrad's story becoming a prism through which modern political insecurities are viewed. It is a tactic that goes back to 1936, when Alfred Hitchcock filmed the story, under the title Sabotage, as a reflection of the developing political pressures in Europe. Ever since, the years that sees an adaptation of The Secret Agent is unlikely to have been a good one for democracy. The BBC put the book on the screen twice in quick succession, in 1967 and 1975, straddling an era of international instability, marked by the rise of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, student riots in France and assassinations in the US. There had even been, in the early 70s, a period of actual anarchist terrorism in England, with bombings carried out by the Angry Brigade. When the BBC again filmed the novel in 1992, with David Suchet as Verloc, The Secret Agent again felt uncannily suited to a period of legislative turmoil and fear of terrorism: four years previously Pan Am flight 103 had exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland in a bombing attributed to Libya, and the series aired during a spell in which governments were tumbling around the world, including those of Margaret Thatcher and the first President Bush, who had been undermined by a populist drive against the political establishment led by a billionaire political outsider, Ross Perot. The strong resonance of the novel in that epoch is shown by the fact that a movie version, written and directed by Christopher Hampton, followed in 1996, its release coming spookily soon after the apprehension by the FBI, of Ted Kaczynski, an American domestic anarchist known as the "Unabomber". A university professor, like the character in The Secret Agent with the explosive coat, Kaczynski had used the pseudonym "Conrad", and appears to have been an admirer of the novel. Although no new screen version followed the 9/11 attacks, the book was regularly referenced in journalistic commentary on the atrocities. So, given this history, it is little surprise that The Secret Agent should turn up on British television in 2016, soon after terrorist attacks in France and Belgium, and in a summer when Donald Trump has become the most successful non-mainstream presidential candidate since Perot. Conrad's book still seems to be the fiction that best expresses western society's concerns about terrorism and popular revolution. And, looking at the fictions on these subjects that have appeared in the subsequent 109 years, the story of Verloc has also influenced each intermittent wave of novels about terrorism, as writers responded to the threats from the IRA, Palestinian terror groups, al-Qaida and now Islamic State. The fuse on this line of writing was lit in the first decade of the 20th century not only by The Secret Agent but by another novel about anarchists that appeared one year later in 1908: The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. Although Conrad's Verloc inhabited an earlier London -- the Greenwich bomb plot takes place in 1886, inspired by a real incident of that time -- the books draw on the same subculture of political dissent. In Chesterton's work, a squad of anti-anarchist police attempts to infiltrate the European Council of Anarchism, whose members maintain anonymity, in a strategy similar to the use of colour-coded aliases by the robbers in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, by each taking the name of a day of the week. Another overlap between The Secret Agent and The Man Who Was Thursday is a contrast between the implications of the stories and the tone in which they are told, a distance signalled by subtitles. Conrad calls his novel "A Simple Tale", and adopts a satirical and moralising attitude towards his characters: Verloc runs a Soho sex shop, while the anarchists with whom he consorts include one whose diet consists only of raw carrots. Categorised by Chesterton as "A Nightmare", The Man Who Was Thursday develops into a farce of subterfuge, in which almost no one is who they claim to be or not to be. And, if Conrad saw in anarchism a chance to dramatise the worst aspects of human behaviour, Chesterton, an optimist and devout Roman Catholic believer, attempts a moral about the possibility of betterment. For obvious historical reasons, the anarchist thriller soon enough gave way in Britain to the genre of war stories, first written by those who had served in the 1914-18 conflict, such as AP Herbert's The Secret Battle (1919), Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (1924-28) and W Somerset Maugham's Ashenden: The British Agent (1928). Veterans of the second world war subsequently reported back in another wave of conflict fiction, including Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea (1951) and two American works from the same year: From Here To Eternity by James Jones and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny. Naval war novels, such as Montsarrat's and Wouk's, are inevitably influenced by Conrad stories based on his career as a merchant seaman (Typhoon, Heart of Darkness), but The Secret Agent also strongly informs war literature. When Alfred Hitchcock, in 1936, based a film on Maugham's Ashenden, he gave it the Conradian title Secret Agent, even though he was almost simultaneously engaged in the project to turn The Secret Agent into the film that became Sabotage. But this confusion is illuminating, as there is a line of inheritance from anarchist to war literature, and, indeed, beyond that, to the next fictional growth area: espionage. The leaders in that field, Graham Greene and John le Carre, had recognisably read Conrad and Maugham. Trails from The Secret Agent and espionage novels can then be traced into the next big burst of fiction about domestic terrorism following the outbreak of the Irish Troubles. The footprints of anarchist fiction can be found here too, as the Irish republican leader Michael Collins, a historical inspiration to the IRA, was a declared admirer of The Man Who Was Thursday, claiming to have learned from it that the best way of avoiding being hunted was not to seem to be hiding anything. Troubles fiction began as early as 1973, when Jack Higgins (the pen name of Harry Patterson) published A Prayer for the Dying, in which the protagonist, Martin Fallon, is a former IRA killer trying to atone for his past. Higgins has also written a sequence of 21 novels since Eye of the Storm (1992), featuring Sean Dillon, a former IRA hitman. The most enduringly praised Troubles thriller, though, has been Gerald Seymour's Harry's Game (1975), in which a British agent goes undercover to hunt the republican assassin of a British politician. Seymour had reported from Belfast for ITN and established the habit of fiction about Northern Irish terrorism initially being written by outsiders. The American Paul Theroux drew on his experience of living in London during the IRA bombing campaign for The Family Arsenal (1976), based around a bombing cell in south London. Another literary immigrant, the Iranian-Rhodesian Doris Lessing, wrote The Good Terrorist (1985), a novel that seems to hold deliberate echoes of The Secret Agent, as Alice, a middle-class communist, becomes involved with a cabal of London anarchists who, inspired by the IRA, transmute into terrorists. For understandable reasons of getting enough of the subject at home -- and the genuine physical risk to publishers and writers who were perceived to be taking sides -- Northern Irish writers have only fully tackled the topic in books written since the establishment of the peace process, by crime writers including Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway and Stuart Neville. The eruption of Catholic-Protestant violence in Northern Ireland was paralleled by increasing Israeli-Arab tension -- from the six-day war of 1967 to the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973 -- and there is a porous border between the literatures of Irish and Middle Eastern terrorism. Seymour followed Harry's Game with The Glory Boys (1976), in which an Arab terrorist teams up with an IRA assassin to attempt to kill an Israeli scientist who is visiting London. Thomas Harris, later to be fabled as the creator of Hannibal Lecter, has acknowledged that watching the Olympics massacre on television inspired him to write the thriller Black Sunday (1975), in which terrorists from the Palestinian Black September movement conspire to detonate a TV airship filled with explosives over the stadium hosting the American football Super Bowl. Whereas Davidson's and Harris's books favour the Israeli perspective, a general realignment in western attitudes towards the Middle East was signalled by Le Carre's The Little Drummer Girl (1983), in which, extending the moral ambiguity that the writer had brought to his cold war spy stories, a woman working as a double agent for Israeli and Palestinian security forces is destroyed by her conflict of loyalties. The next swell of novels about bombers featured the Islamist extremism that began with al-Qaida and now continues via the various iterations of Isis. What is striking about this subgenre of terrorism fiction, though, is the extent to which it anticipated rather than retro-dramatised events. The concept of the suicide plane bomb had been a pivotal plotline in The Better Angels, a 1979 thriller by Charles McCarry, which also featured Ibn Awad, a radical Islamist warlord who seems a shivery premonition of Osama bin Laden. As McCarry is a former CIA agent, some aspects of his storytelling may have been informed by agency wargaming. Tom Clancy, an author who had less formal but friendly links with the security establishment, also spookily previewed 9/11 in Debt of Honour (1994), in which a 747 is flown deliberately into the Capitol building, removing most of the United States government. (Read now, Harris's Black Sunday also feels prophetic in having imagined, more than a quarter of a century before it occurred, terrorist mass murder from the skies.) Post-9/11, the threat coming from a state of mind rather than a single nation state became a common trope in novels, including McCarry's Old Boys (2004), in which Ibn Awad reappears, although now seeming not the conception of Bin Laden but an inflection. One of Bin Laden's favoured weapons was the "clean skin" or "homegrown" terrorist, radicalised and turned against their own country. This concept is explored from very different national and literary angles in At Risk (2005), written by former MI5 boss Stella Rimington ; John Updike 's novel Terrorist (2006); and Chris Cleave's Incendiary (2005), which, with grim serendipity, was published on the day of the 7/7 attacks on the London transport system. As state-of-mind bombings have graduated to the attempt to impose an Islamic state, mass attacks on cities have become a narrative commonplace in fiction: unlikely to sell in large quantities at transport hubs are Andy McNab's Red Notice (2012), in which 400 passengers are taken hostage in the Channel tunnel, and Crisis, in which the UK capital is threatened with unparalleled massacre, by Frank Gardner, the BBC's security correspondent, who is one of the few victims of terrorism (shot and seriously injured by al-Qaida sympathisers in 2004) to have written in the genre. The characters in these novels will hope that the terrorists they are up against prove to be as incompetent or eccentric as Conrad's Verloc and the suicide-vested professor in the book that started the form. - Mark Lawson.
Choice Review
Scholars and others deeply interested in the works of Joseph Conrad will be grateful for the recent edition of The Secret Agent, which is part of the Cambridge edition of Conrad's works. An authoritative text is supplemented by information about the range of alterations made by the author, from the serial publication in Ridgeway's to the eventual publication as a book in 1907. The changes, which include consistent decisions to increase the ironic distance and detachment of the narrative, are full of interest to those both knowledgeable and serious about Joseph Conrad's style and development. Many of the textual notes, however, are much more technical and of narrower interest. In general, this edition will be welcome to scholars and a useful resource to readers already deeply interested in Conrad. -R. Nadelhaft, University of Maine at Orono
Library Journal Review
In 1894, the year Polish-born Conrad settled in England, a failed attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory left an alleged anarchist blown up instead. With such spare facts for inspiration, Conrad crafted this London-based story of political intrigue, police duplicity, familial discord, and ubiquitous corruption. Composed of long, intense encounters between two or three characters, this relentlessly dark tale is fueled by vitriolic contempt for its participants. Viewed by some critics as Conrad's best, it contains some of his most voluble prose and has been adapted by Alfred Hitchcock (Sabotage), by British television, and into a forthcoming film with Gerard Depardieu in the title role. This program, narrated with sharp insight and full dramatic power by British actor David Threlfall, is superior to previous audio renditions and is the best way to enjoy the full measure of Conrad's achievement. Highly recommended.Peter Josyph, New York(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law. The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London.1 The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar. The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two and six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong--rousing titles.2 And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy's sake or for the sake of the customers. These customers were either very young men, who hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in funds. Some of that last kind had the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud on the bottom of their nether garments, which had the appearance of being much worn and not very valuable. And the legs inside them did not, as a general rule, seem of much account either. With their hands plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going. The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of steel, was difficult to circumvent. It was hopelessly cracked; but of an evening, at the slightest provocation, it clattered behind the customer with impudent virulence. It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door behind the painted deal counter, Mr. Verloc would issue hastily from the parlour at the back. His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed. Another man would have felt such an appearance a distinct disadvantage. In a commercial transaction of the retail order much depends on the seller's engaging and amiable aspect. But Mr. Verloc knew his business, and remained undisturbed by any sort of æsthetic doubt about his appearance. With a firm, steady eyed impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of some abominable menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter some object looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed in the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside, for instance, or one of those carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers with a promising title. Now and then it happened that one of the faded, yellow dancing-girls would get sold to an amateur, as though she had been alive and young. Sometimes it was Mrs. Verloc who would appear at the call of the cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. Steady eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink, retail value sixpence (price in Verloc's shop one and sixpence), which, once outside, he would drop stealthily into the gutter. The evening visitors--the men with collars turned up and soft hats rammed down--nodded familiarly to Mrs. Verloc, and with a muttered greeting, lifted up the flap at the end of the counter in order to pass into the back parlour, which gave access to a passage and to a steep flight of stairs. The door of the shop was the only means of entrance to the house in which Mr. Verloc carried on his business of a seller of shady wares, exercised his vocation of a protector of society, and cultivated his domestic virtues. These last were pronounced. He was thoroughly domesticated. Neither his spiritual, nor his mental, nor his physical needs were of the kind to take him much abroad. He found at home the ease of his body and the peace of his conscience, together with Mrs. Verloc's wifely attentions and Mrs. Verloc's mother's deferential regard. Winnie's mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown face. She wore a black wig under a white cap. Her swollen legs rendered her inactive. She considered herself to be of French descent, which might have been true; and after a good many years of married life with a licensed victualler3 of the more common sort, she provided for the years of widowhood by letting furnished apartments for gentlemen near Vauxhall Bridge Road in a square once of some splendour and still included in the district of Belgravia.4 This topographical fact was of some advantage in advertising her rooms; but the patrons of the worthy widow were not exactly of the fashionable kind. Such as they were, her daughter Winnie helped to look after them. Traces of the French descent which the widow boasted of were apparent in Winnie too. They were apparent in the extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark hair. Winnie had also other charms: her youth; her full, rounded form; her clear complexion; the provocation of her unfathomable reserve, which never went so far as to prevent conversation, carried on on the lodgers' part with animation, and on hers with an equable amiability. It must be that Mr. Verloc was susceptible to these fascinations. Mr. Verloc was an intermittent patron. He came and went without any very apparent reason. He generally arrived in London (like the influenza) from the Continent, only he arrived unheralded by the Press; and his visitations set in with great severity. He breakfasted in bed, and remained wallowing there with an air of quiet enjoyment till noon every day--and sometimes even to a later hour. But when he went out he seemed to experience a great difficulty in finding his way back to his temporary home in the Belgravian square. He left it late, and returned to it early--as early as three or four in the morning; and on waking up at ten addressed Winnie, bringing in the breakfast tray, with jocular, exhausted civility, in the hoarse, failing tones of a man who had been talking vehemently for many hours together. His prominent, heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and languidly, the bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his dark smooth moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed banter. In Winnie's mother's opinion Mr. Verloc was a very nice gentleman. From her life's experience gathered in various "business houses" the good woman had taken into her retirement an ideal of gentlemanliness as exhibited by the patrons of private-saloon bars. Mr. Verloc approached that ideal; he attained it, in fact. "Of course, we'll take over your furniture, mother," Winnie had remarked. The lodging house was to be given up. It seems it would not answer to carry it on. It would have been too much trouble for Mr. Verloc. It would not have been convenient for his other business. What his business was he did not say; but after his engagement to Winnie he took the trouble to get up before noon, and descending the basement stairs, make himself pleasant to Winnie's mother in the breakfast room downstairs where she had her motionless being. He stroked the cat, poked the fire, had his lunch served to him there. He left its slightly stuffy cosiness with evident reluctance, but, all the same, remained out till the night was far advanced. He never offered to take Winnie to theatres, as such a nice gentleman ought to have done. His evenings were occupied. His work was in a way political, he told Winnie once. She would have, he warned her, to be very nice to his political friends. And with her straight, unfathomable glance she answered that she would be so, of course. How much more he told her as to his occupation it was impossible for Winnie's mother to discover. The married couple took her over with the furniture. The mean aspect of the shop surprised her. The change from the Belgravian square to the narrow street in Soho5 affected her legs adversely. They became of an enormous size. On the other hand, she experienced a complete relief from material cares. Her son-in-law's heavy good nature inspired her with a sense of absolute safety. Her daughter's future was obviously assured, and even as to her son Stevie she need have no anxiety. She had not been able to conceal from herself that he was a terrible encumbrance, that poor Stevie. But in view of Winnie's fondness for her delicate brother, and of Mr. Verloc's kind and generous disposition, she felt that the poor boy was pretty safe in this rough world. And in her heart of hearts she was not perhaps displeased that the Verlocs had no children. As that circumstance seemed perfectly indifferent to Mr. Verloc, and as Winnie found an object of quasi-maternal affection in her brother, perhaps this was just as well for poor Stevie. For he was difficult to dispose of, that boy. He was delicate and, in a frail way, good-looking too, except for the vacant droop of his lower lip. Under our excellent system of compulsory education6 he had learned to read and write, notwithstanding the unfavourable aspect of the lower lip. But as errand-boy he did not turn out a great success. He forgot his messages; he was easily diverted from the straight path of duty by the attractions of stray cats and dogs, which he followed down narrow alleys into unsavoury courts; by the comedies of the streets, which he contemplated open mouthed, to the detriment of his employer's interests; or by the dramas of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him sometimes to shriek pierceingly in a crowd, which disliked to be disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national spectacle. When led away by a grave and protecting policeman, it would often become apparent that poor Stevie had forgotten his address--at least for a time. A brusque question caused him to stutter to the point of suffocation. When startled by anything perplexing he used to squint horribly. However, he never had any fits (which was encouraging); and before the natural outbursts of impatience on the part of his father he could always, in his childhood's days, run for protection behind the short skirts of his sister Winnie. On the other hand, he might have been suspected of hiding a fund of reckless naughtiness. When he had reached the age of fourteen a friend of his late father, an agent for a foreign preserved milk firm, having given him an opening as office boy, he was discovered one foggy afternoon, in his chief's absence, busy letting off fireworks on the staircase. He touched off in quick succession a set of fierce rockets, angry catherine wheels, loudly exploding squibs--and the matter might have turned out very serious. An awful panic spread through the whole building. Wild-eyed, choking clerks stampeded through the passages full of smoke, silk hats and elderly business men could be seen rolling independently down the stairs. Stevie did not seem to derive any personal gratification from what he had done. His motives for this stroke of originality were difficult to discover. It was only later on that Winnie obtained from him a misty and confused confession. It seems that two other office-boys in the building had worked upon his feelings by tales of injustice and oppression till they had wrought his compassion to the pitch of that frenzy. But his father's friend, of course, dismissed him summarily as likely to ruin his business. After that altruistic exploit Stevie was put to help wash the dishes in the basement kitchen, and to black the boots of the gentlemen patronising the Belgravian mansion. There was obviously no future in such work. The gentlemen tipped him a shilling now and then. Mr. Verloc showed himself the most generous of lodgers. But altogether all that did not amount to much either in the way of gain or prospects; so that when Winnie announced her engagement to Mr. Verloc her mother could not help wondering, with a sigh and a glance towards the scullery, what would become of poor Stephen now. It appeared that Mr. Verloc was ready to take him over together with his wife's mother and with the furniture, which was the whole visible fortune of the family. Mr. Verloc gathered everything as it came to his broad, goodnatured breast. The furniture was disposed to the best advantage all over the house, but Mrs. Verloc's mother was confined to two back rooms on the first floor. The luckless Stevie slept in one of them. By this time a growth of thin fluffy hair had come to blur, like a golden mist, the sharp line of his small lower jaw. He helped his sister with blind love and docility in her household duties. Mr. Verloc thought that some occupation would be good for him. His spare time he occupied by drawing circles with compass and pencil on a piece of paper. He applied himself to that pastime with great industry, with his elbows spread out and bowed low over the kitchen table. Through the open door of the parlour at the back of the shop Winnie, his sister, glanced at him from time to time with maternal vigilance. Excerpted from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
