“Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
With so many books available in a multiplicity of forms, and the impossibility of reading everything we might be attracted to, why pick up The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad?
Conrad has long been admired and loved by readers and we may wish to see for ourselves why this is so. For me, he has an unusual and arresting literary style, a penetrating, realistic (some say pessimistic) view of human behaviour and experience, offering analysis on both individual and socio-political levels. He has outstanding, sometimes complex, narrative powers and a persuasive empathetic understanding.
On a less general level, some features of Conrad’s writing serve to define his sensibility as modern and of clear relevance to our twenty-first century preoccupations. Globalisation was getting into its stride as he wrote his tales, and they are saturated with issues which still concern us today. His profound confrontation of terrorism, racism, colonialism, alienation and the power of international capitalism often appears startlingly prescient. From his writer’s desk, he reflected on the rapidly changing world of his time, drawing on his early experiences on board the ships which facilitated the development of intercontinental communications.
Living at a time of such rapid innovations, he was profoundly aware of flux and change in human life. A child of the nineteenth century, he was stunned by the discovery of entropy, and the concomitant view of our earth as a planet which will eventually wind down and die rather than being preternaturally favoured by a benevolent divine being. In Conrad’s lifetime the so-called ‘Death of God’, trumpeted by Nietzsche, was still a fledgling idea, jostling to establish itself. In adopting the positivist stance of his time and a non-religious viewpoint, Conrad faces towards the twentieth century. He lived when the times they were a-changing, and this is reflected in his creative response to developments in the novelistic arts. Some critics, rather patronisingly, think of him (along with Henry James) as forming a bridge between realism and modernism, condescendingly suggesting that he is neither one thing nor the other. They seem to regret that he cannot be pigeon-holed more precisely!
Finally, there are also some very specific reasons for reading this book now. A terrorist action is at its heart, and many contemporary readers – made shockingly aware of terrorism in our own century – have turned for enlightenment to Conrad’s novel. Whether they have found it, I cannot say, but the instinct of turning to literature in the hope of gaining some understanding of such a disturbing phenomenon seems to me to be a good one. I am also convinced by my reading of both this book and Under Western Eyes that Joseph Conrad, if magically resurrected today, would instantly recognise Putin’s strategy and sense an astonishing continuity in Russia’s current foreign policy.
But, we are talking about a work of the imagination and we can never be sure where it may lead us. The central character in Conrad’s novel is a refugee/immigrant, trying to forge an identity for himself in a strange country. This is, of course, rather like Conrad himself, but current preoccupations may mean that the themes of immigration and identity strike us more strongly than any others. Who knows? The only way to find out is to read this extraordinary book . . .
Keith Fosbrook will facilitate a five-week study of The Secret Agent starting on 4 October.
