How Conrad’s idiot terror plot came true

In the age of al Qaeda and Skripal, Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel ‘The Secret Agent’ feels disturbingly prescient

There is a passage in Siegfried Sassoon’s wartime diaries in which he recounts the experience of sheltering in a dugout on the Western Front, during a particularly savage German bombardment, with a group of officers – and men – all of whom were reading the works of Joseph Conrad. Whether you consider this to reflect well on the Britain of the early 20th century or negatively on that of the early 21st – when literacy rates are falling – the fact remains that at this time Conrad was one of a handful of writers capable of bridging the gap between paramount artistic ambition and the quotidian enjoyment of a rattling good yarn.

In his most celebrated work, the novella Heart of Darkness (1899), the author fashioned a tale-within-a-tale, in which the genocidal hell of the Belgian Congo was nested cosily on the deck of a pleasure yacht moored in the Thames Estuary. In Under Western Eyes (1911) – which is the thematic sequel, if not a narrative continuation of The Secret Agent (1907) – Conrad created a sort of “once-removed” first-person narrative, whereby the English translator of a

Russian agent provocateur’s diary mixes its content with his own contemporaneous accounts of the individuals featured in its pages. Conrad’s own stated intention was that this device should impress upon his democracy-and-clarity-loving English-language readers the obscurity of the czarist despotism’s doublethink.

At least superficially, while charged with the same sort of ambitions, The Secret Agent avoids such narratological stratagems: recounted from an impersonal third-person perspective, the story of Adolf Verloc’s undoing as a secret agent has a beginning, a middle and very definitely an end. Nevertheless, such is its narrator’s tone – and such is the

text’s stylistic oddity – that the tale becomes credible despite, rather than because of, its manner of being told.

Conrad has a way with the idiomatic substratum of English – its vast storehouse of internal allusion – that’s at once timorous and radical: he snatches up turns of phrase, holds them up to the light, then very slightly – yet wilfully – misapplies them. English is a syntactically elastic language that forgives the clumsiest rearrangement of its parts, and Conrad’s prose seems to revel in this licence, pushing sentences ever so slightly out of joint so as to produce an uncanny overall impression: it looks like beautifully crafted English prose – and it reads as such (at least silently), yet somehow it just… isn’t.

To this, in the matter of The Secret Agent, Conrad admixes a great deal of facetiousness. Comfortable for many years with his sinecure as the secret agent of the Baron Stott-Wartenheim, the spymaster of an unnamed – but clearly the Russian – embassy, and with the proceeds from his pornographer’s shop in Soho, Mr Verloc is appalled when the Baron’s successor – the far more Machiavellian Mr Vladimir – orders him (as Conrad might put it) to sing for his supper by committing a terrorist outrage. “What do you think of having a go at astronomy?” Mr Vladimir proposes, reasoning that in the post-Darwinian world of lateVictorian England, science is the only true religion.

Such a plan: to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, as if it were somehow possible, conceptually, to destroy time – and along with it capitalist society – might seem to be the very essence of Conrad’s facetious inventiveness. And yet an outrage of this sort was apparently planned – and imperfectly executed – by a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, in February

1894. There’s this fact – acknowledged as a source by Conrad himself in his Author’s Note to The Secret Agent – and there’s also the inherently fanciful nature of terrorism itself, which depends for the most part on its victims’ imagination.

This, in contradistinction to conventional warfare, which is utterly prosaic: unstoppable bullets striking immovable ranks. While infinitely more devastating, the Sept 11 2001 attacks by al

Qaeda “franchisees” on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and potentially a third target in the capital, were also examples of how terrorist logic fuses symbolism and reality. Both weaponry ( jet airliners) and targets were chosen for what they represented: under the aegis of its neoliberal boosters, the high-rise office block and the high-speed transit system are realised as part of what anthropologists term a “symbol set”; one which, when employed by a skilled practitioner, magics progress into being. In the aftermath of 9/11 much was made of the supposedly “medieval” cast of the Islamist terrorists’ mindset. They, it was supposed, were – in a chilling echo of Curtis LeMay’s policy for North Vietnam – determined to bomb the West back to the Middle Ages.

But the truth is that terrorism – like the delusions of schizophrenics – adapts its wild ideas from the most up-to-date machine dreams. We know very little about Bourdin’s motivations, or his political associations, but we know a great deal about the inexorable progress of Greenwich Mean Time in late-Victorian England – and in the world more generally. The symbol set of steam engines, steel rails, precision chronometers – and latterly, the telegraph – conjured, over a span of three or four decades, the programming of the incremental division of time into the Western collective consciousness, and so democratised what had been formerly the preserve of elites; namely, the zeitgeist. When the blood dripping from the carving knife plunged into Adolf Verloc’s chest strikes the parlour floor, it seems – in the ears of his murderess – to merge with the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece.

Some critics have seen this as Conrad’s buried hint that had the poor “idiot” boy, Stevie, been successful in fulfilling Mr Vladimir’s scheme, the first great age of globalisation would, indeed, magically have gone up in a puff of smoke. The Greenwich bomb would’ve been – if you like – a sort of Victorian steampunk version of the millennium bug that so troubled us in the dying days of the 20th century. Space, time and their odd interlinkages seem to lie at the very core of Conrad’s thinking in this novel: Stevie’s evening occupation in the dingy shop, where he lives with his mother, sister Winnie and her husband Mr Verloc, is to sit at a

Like the contemporary suicide bomber, the novel’s evil Professor is really a craven figure

table covering sheets of paper with strange and wild patterns of interlinked circles – neatly drawn with compass and pencil – round and around, again and again. His obsessive repetitiveness, Conrad seems to be suggesting, reflects an inexorable aspect of the world: there are no counterfactuals; what is will be, for ever and ever, world without end.

In our own era, terrorism has been treated jocosely by satirists – sometimes, as in the case of the