The Secret Agent: The First Terrorist Novel

In 1907, Joseph Conrad wrote a novel about a plot to bomb a London landmark, hatched by a shabby double agent among a circle of café revolutionaries who mostly just talk. The Secret Agent was ahead of its time then; it reads now like this morning’s news.

Conrad’s insight, a century before our own age of terror, was to strip the bomb-plot of all glamour. His anarchists are not heroic or even frightening; they are vain, lazy, self-deceiving — men in love with the idea of destruction who leave the actual dirty work to the weakest and most innocent person in the book. The one figure of pure conviction, the Professor, walks the streets wired to explode, dreaming of a clean slate; he is the ancestor of every lone fanatic since. And at the centre is a small domestic tragedy that the great abstractions crush without noticing.

Read beside Dostoevsky’s Demons, it completes literature’s early diagnosis of the terrorist mind — the way grand ideas about liberating humanity curdle into the willingness to murder it. Conrad saw, with cold clarity, that the enemy of civilization and its self-appointed saviour can wear the same shabby coat.

This edition gathers it among Conrad’s major works.

Read The Essential Joseph Conrad →