The National Interest
Thanksgiving 2001

The Little Man's Revenge

by Robert D. Kaplan

 

. . . In 1884, anarchists tried to blow up the Greenwich Royal Observatory outside London, then the symbol of modern scientific thought on which Britain’s world empire was based. The novelist Joseph Conrad found the act "a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought." He could not grasp why anyone would blow himself to bits "for nothing even remotely resembling an idea." Conrad, like so many writers, discovered the answer to his question by a writing a book.

The Secret Agent, published in 1907, is about a shadowy anarchist, Adolf Verloc, who owns a shop selling low-end goods in a grimy, working class district of London. He supports his wife, her retarded brother and his mother-in-law with the help of money from Russian diplomats, in return for information he provides them on his fellow radicals. Russia’s reactionary regime, worried about the increasing openness of British society—which threatens to alienate London from St. Petersburg—believes that only an act of sheer madness will bring Britain’s security establishment to its senses; and thus Verloc is activated to blow up the first meridian. "This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty", complains the czarist diplomat, Mr. Vladimir, to Verloc. "The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses" and destroy them. Pressured by Vladimir to act soon—or risk losing his stipend—Verloc recruits his retarded brother-in-law, Stevie, to plant the bomb. But it explodes too early, leaving Stevie a bloody heap whose remains have to be collected by police with a shovel. After finding out what happened, Verloc’s wife, Winnie, murders her husband, and then commits suicide.

The plot of The Secret Agent does not parallel the terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, but Conrad’s uncanny insights into individuals and their society provide an analysis of what America is now up against that is unavailable in media reports. . . .