the secret agent (joseph conrad)

There’s a history attached to this novel. The first week or so at university, we were given Conrad’s novel to read and write an essay on. I spent those days holed up in my room, avoiding the Freshers escapades, suffering from migraine, reading the book and writing about it. When the seminar arrived, no-one else wanted to read their essay, so I volunteered. My thesis, I remember, was that the real secret agent in the novel was humour. The essay went down well, it might have been the only good essay I ever wrote, because I later ceased being a model student with migraines and became the chaotic student I have remained for the rest of my life. That seminar group was, in its way, something that would radically affect my whole life and way of seeing the world, for better or for worse, and The Secret Agent was a big part of that process.

It has been in the background ever since, over the course of thirty plus years. As is the way with books you read in your youth, I have retained a clear but erroneous memory of it. I realise it was erroneous as, for some reason to do, I suspect, with ageing, I recently chose to revisit the novel. It is not as funny as I might have remembered it to be (suggesting my thesis was wide of the mark). It is a strange, unwieldy book, which shifts point of view almost chapter by chapter, which rambles, whose central dramatic moment happens offstage (something I had not remembered). Characters come in and out of the text with no-one establishing centre stage. Just as a dismembered body is at the heart of the narrative, so this is a dismembered story, with the writer choosing to scatter its parts across Edwardian London.

On another level, the novel, which deals with Russian interference in British politics, feels astonishingly prescient. Terrorism, state terrorism and the shady characters who make up that world, have been leitmotifs of the twenty first century. In a world where centralised geopolitical power is waning, Britain is susceptible to the Machiavellian wiles of opponents it doesn’t even realise it possesses until it is too late. Little men representing an ideology that holds no real interest instigate actions which threaten the fabric of society. Conrad’s vision is cynical and prescient.

Still, I struggled with the novel. I wanted it to return me to a place I had known once upon a time, an Anthony I had been once upon a time. But the novel resisted, insisted on disabusing me of any intimacy with the previous version of it and myself that had existed. The reading of a novel is like the living of a life. Our perception of the novel is contingent on our surroundings, our sense of self at the time we read it. The secret agent isn’t humour. It’s time. The most dangerous, destabilising agent of all.