The Secret Agent

Joseph Conrad

4 ideas

1. The Greenwich bombing that killed Stevie

   Verloc, a Soho shopkeeper and embassy informer, is threatened by the diplomat Mr. Vladimir with losing his pay unless he stages an outrage against the Greenwich Observatory. He sends his trusting, intellectually disabled brother-in-law Stevie to carry the bomb, and Stevie stumbles in the park and is blown to pieces. When his wife Winnie learns the truth she stabs Verloc with a carving knife, flees with the anarchist Ossipon, who robs and abandons her, and she drowns herself from a Channel ferry.

2. Terror works best when it attacks meaning

   Mr. Vladimir argues that bombing kings or crowds no longer shocks, because society has a ready explanation for such attacks: revenge, class hatred, madness. An attack on something the bourgeoisie venerates but cannot see as political, such as pure science or the prime meridian, would be an act of senseless destructive ferocity. Because it has no motive anyone can grasp, it would provoke the most fear and the harshest crackdown.

3. Power through willingness to die

   The Professor walks London with a detonator in his pocket that will explode in twenty seconds if he squeezes a rubber ball, so the police leave him alone. His power over the police comes from the fact that he values his own life less than they value theirs. Society's defenses rest on the assumption that its opponents also want to survive. The man who does not share that assumption is untouchable, but he stays isolated and small, one terror among millions of indifferent people.

4. Life depends on not looking closely

   Winnie Verloc's guiding belief is that things do not stand much looking into. She married Verloc for security for Stevie and never asked what he did. Her household runs on a deliberate refusal to know. When the truth finally forces itself on her, the whole arrangement collapses at once into murder and suicide.

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