The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: A Full Summary and Guide
What The Secret Agent is about
Joseph Conrad published The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale in book form on 12 September 1907, after it ran as eleven instalments in Ridgway's between 1905 and 1906. It is set in Soho, London in 1886. The subtitle is not to be trusted. Very little about the tale is simple.
Adolf Verloc keeps a shop selling pornographic material, contraceptives and bric-a-brac. He lives above it with his wife Winnie, her mother and her brother Stevie. He also works as a spy and agent provocateur for an unnamed foreign country, presumably Russia. The arrangement has suited him for years. It pays, it asks almost nothing of him, and it allows him to keep company with a circle of London anarchists who talk a great deal and achieve very little.
That comfortable life ends when Verloc is summoned to the embassy and meets Mr Vladimir, the new First Secretary. Vladimir has read Verloc's service record and is unimpressed. Britain, he argues, is too relaxed about anarchism, and the only thing that will force a crackdown is an outrage the public cannot explain away. He orders Verloc to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. An attack on science, Vladimir reasons, will shock people in a way that an attack on a politician never could.
Conrad builds the book around that order and its consequences, but he tells it out of sequence. The reader learns that an explosion has happened at Greenwich and that one man died before learning how it came about. The novel then circles back through the Verloc household to show what was going on at home while the plot was being made. This is one of Conrad's later political novels, written after he had turned away from stories of the sea. The gloomy London he paints owes a debt to Dickens's Bleak House. The book is dedicated to H. G. Wells.
The main characters
Verloc is a lazy, physically heavy man who thinks of himself as a protector of order and is in fact a paid provocateur. He is not a fanatic. He is a man who wants to be left alone and who will do considerable damage to avoid being made uncomfortable.
Winnie Verloc married him for practical reasons and runs the household on a single fixed principle: Stevie must be looked after. Stevie has an intellectual disability which makes him excitable and acutely sensitive to cruelty. Winnie treats him more as a son than a brother. A hansom ride with a driver who whips his horse and has a hook for a hand distresses Stevie badly, and that small scene tells you everything about how the world appears to him.
The anarchists are Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis and the man known as The Professor. They produce pamphlets under the title F.P., for The Future of the Proletariat. They are largely ineffectual, and the police know all about them. The Professor is the exception, a genuinely dangerous figure who carries a bomb in his coat at all times, wired so that he can kill himself and anyone near him in twenty seconds.
On the other side sit Chief Inspector Heat, a competent policeman with his own sources, and the Assistant Commissioner, whose interest in the case is partly social. He moves in the same circles as Michaelis and wants to know how much embarrassment the connection might cause. He decides to work the case himself rather than leave it to Heat.
The themes
Nobody in the novel acts from the motive they claim. Vladimir wants repression, not revolution. Verloc wants a quiet life. The Assistant Commissioner wants to protect his acquaintances. Ossipon wants money. Conrad sets every institution and every ideology against the question of what the person involved actually gains, and the answer is rarely flattering.
Underneath this runs the exploitation of the vulnerable. Stevie is the one character with no agenda at all, and he is the one the plot uses. His sensitivity to suffering, which is treated as a defect by everyone around him, is the only moral instinct in the book.
Identity is the third strand. Verloc is a shopkeeper, a husband, an agent and an informer, and the roles cannot be held together once pressure is applied. The novel is interested in what happens when a man's private life and his secret work finally collide.
How it ends
This section gives away the ending. Stop here if you would rather not know.
The bomb kills Stevie. Verloc had taken the boy for a walk, told Winnie he was sending him to stay with Michaelis in the country, and then used him to carry the device. Chief Inspector Heat recovers an overcoat at the scene with the shop address written on a label. Winnie confirms she wrote it herself. When Verloc comes home and confesses, Winnie stabs him to death.
She flees and runs into Ossipon, who agrees to help her. He declares romantic feelings while privately intending to get hold of Verloc's bank savings. He puts her on a boat for the continent.
Why it still matters
Conrad adapted the novel for the stage himself, and it has since been made into film, television, radio and opera. Its reputation has never rested on action. It rests on the cold accuracy of its portrait of people who use causes as cover.
The book's afterlife took a sharp turn in 2001. In the two weeks following the September 11 attacks, The Secret Agent was one of the three works of literature most cited in the American media. A novel written about 1886 and published in 1907 was being read as a description of how terrorism actually works: through vanity, incompetence, state manipulation and the destruction of people who had nothing to do with any of it.
It suits readers who want political fiction with no heroes, and anyone interested in how the spy novel began. It is short, bleak and precisely built, and the irony of the subtitle lands harder the second time you read it.
