![]() One of Conrad's characters, Yundt, not a man of action or even an inspiring orator, epitomises this world: “With a more subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity and revolt.” That’s the world Conrad portrays and this is the world his revolutionaries, who also stand for above-ground politicians, bankers, businessmen and the poor bloody infantry that make up the social majority, shabbily inhabit. We understand more about Conrad’s world now because we live in a latter-day version of it, blooded by terrorism and by the fear of terrorism, caught up in a bonfire of the old ideologies, each of us nervously guarding our circles of society and anxiously negotiating our intersections with others. The challenge, not quite met by Christopher Hampton’s script, was to convey Conrad’s characters - and that includes the worn policeman Heat, who should be the book’s moral centre but somehow isn’t – with the right mix of caricatural savagery and human depth. The Secret Agent was filmed a year before, with Bob Hoskins as Verloc and with Patricia Arquette, Gerard Depardieu, Eddie Izzard, Jim Broadbent and Christian Bale all in the cast. We understand more about Conrad’s world now because we live in a latter-day version of it, blooded by terrorism and by the fear of terrorism ![]() He stands behind the maniac Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, though Coppola’s epic is by no means a straightforward dramatisation of Heart of Darkness. The only victims are the innocent, the only potent loyalties those of family and blood.Ĭonrad has a curious history on screen. In fact, Burns’s “tape-recorded” testimonies were entirely fictional and not based on specific research, while Conrad’s revolutionaries are a compound of dockyard chatter and high-society gossip, his revolutionaries mere toothless cogs in a dysfunctional machine. Thirteen years after first publishing The Secret Agent Conrad felt a need to step forward and justify his portrayals by saying that he had received many communications from ex-radicals saying, in effect, “yes, we were exactly like that”. When the English lawyer and novelist Alan Burns published The Angry Brigade in 1973, he was equally praised and condemned for his accurate rendition of dissident voices in British society. In suggesting that ideology is a form of masturbation, Conrad seems to be reinforcing his view, expressed quite explicitly in the early pages of The Secret Agent, that it is not ideas but made and useful things that form society. And yet the indiarubber ball he holds in his pocket suggests self-abuse as much as fanaticism.īut again Conrad isn’t so much concerned with the psychology of the suicide bomber, however of the moment such a possibility might seem. He keeps a live bomb on his person at all times and clutches its trigger, determined never to be taken alive or without taking a policeman with him. If Verloc is the central character, the provocateur charged with engineering an event that will heighten security across the enervated capital, then the Professor is the most sinisterly comic. He keeps a live bomb on his person at all times and clutches its trigger, determined never to be taken alive or without taking a policeman with him Instead, Conrad’s revolutionaries are barely human, physically repulsive, eloquent in an ideology that seems to go nowhere but back to its own premises. There are no saintly Prince Kropotkins among Conrad’s plotters, or from fiction any version of the radiant Christina Light or Paul Muniment in Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, which also has a setting of radical politics. The Secret Agent is sometimes adduced as an example of what is misleadingly called, following Hannah Arendt, “the banality of evil”. Eliot also referred to the Greenwich bomber – as “Boudin” rather than Bourdin – in a poem called “ Animula” written 20 years later, and seven after the publication of his own The Waste Land, which also seems to revive the spirit of Conrad’s bleak 1907 satire: all those seedy characters trying to make a connection, and falling short. In fact, it’s a novel that uses an actual attempt in 1894 to blow up the Greenwich Observatory as a narrative device to explore a society which Conrad, a Polish émigré and former sailor, viewed very much from the outside, even as he inhabited its language with more than native precision. It is said that sales of The Secret Agent rose sharply after the 9/11 attacks on New York City, as if the book offered insight into the mind-set of incendiary politics and the suicide bomber. ![]() Conrad’s revolutionaries are barely human, physically repulsive, eloquent in an ideology that seems to go nowhere
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