Thinkling

Serialized originally in (to modern sensibilities rather inauspiciously named) magazine "Ridgway's: a Militant Weekly for God and Country", the novel was soon out in book form in 1907. The center of the plot, however, takes its hint from an actual event of some years earlier, a mysterious failed bomb attack, by an anarchist Martial Bourdin, at the Greenwich astronomic observatory, in 1894. Obviously fascinated by the grotesque incomprehensibility of the choice of such target for a terrorist attack, Conrad set it in the middle of a stage of a dark drama of absurd causes and their absurd effects.
The story unfolds at several levels: Mr. Verloc, posing as a small nondescript shop owner in a narrow London backstreet, leads an uneventful family life beside his wife Winnie with her mentally handicapped brother Stevie and her aging mother; in his other life, however, Verloc turns out to be a long-serving secret agent of some renown, in the pay of the embassy of an unidentified continental power, entrusted with the task of infiltrating the leading circles of the anarchist movement in Britain. The ironic depiction of the motley assembly of comrades constituting the revolutionary headquarters, as well as the subtle political intrigues on the background of the police investigations into the terrorist attack, including the clash of wills and agendas between the respective top officers responsible for the inquiry, represent the other planes of the unfolding of events.

The new First Secretary of the unspecified embassy, out of vanity, self-importance, or sheer idiocy, tries his hand at scaring and blackmailing his long-serving spy, Verloc, into resolute action, thus setting in motion a train of unpredicted events whose effects reverberate through Home Office and Scotland Yard and ultimately cost lives of the principal actors. Britain is too self-complacent in its illusion of civil liberites and public order, and its authorities must be shaken into ruthless suppression of the sprouting revolutionary anarchist movement which finds a relatively safe haven here. This view is to an extent shared by the only true anarchist, the unfathomable "Professor", an expert in explosives in search of a perfect detonator, a pure terrorist devoted entirely to the destruction of the entire social order, of which the other anarchists merely write fashionable books. (Reproaching his comrades, Professor declares, in a speech that resonates with more than one aspect of our contemporary predicament: "To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half of our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in in its own temple. This is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionises will never understand that.")

A fake terrorist attack of a great symbolic impact should serve to provoke British police and government to precisely such response. But things go grotesquely wrong for Verloc, enlisting his feeble-minded brother-in-law to carry out the bombing, and as things lose their previous appearance of normalcy, individuals overstep the boundaries of their conventionally defined paths of life and take shockingly destructive and self-destructive courses of action. The reader is left without a hero (or heroine) to look to and with little light to be made out at the end of the tunnel. Conrad's bleak world is one perceived through the optics of an intelligence and powers of observation so penetrating that they tend to leave their bearer in a disillusioned and deeply sceptical position regarding human condition in general.

Black humour mingles ominously with genuine chilling effect of revelations of motives which reflect the darkest of motions of the psyche of individuals. In the world of Conrad's explorations into our hearts of darkness, people give each other signals, disguised as information, which either intentionally or by mere impossibility of better mutual understanding, provide often fatally false clues as to the real motives and real thoughts of the actors. Short term practical decisions of an old lady caring for the well-being of the family, providential professional insights of a police commissioner, lifelong loyalty of a wife, or political deliberations of a leading statesman, all of these can be based on an entirely misled interpretation of those signals which reach us from others. Conrad's world is built around the scary but very real paradoxical possibility that we may and probably often do act, both privately and publicly, on beliefs about motives and feelings of others which can be fundamentally misconstrued and desperately wrong. It points not only to some very dark sides of human nature, but hints at a possibly even darker suggestion, namely that we very probably pass our lives in one huge lonely misunderstanding and that the others we thought we knew are potentially ominous universes of unknown motives and unpredictable decisions.

I have a deep respect and admiration for the man who became known under the name of Joseph Conrad, but I also privately and perhaps rather immodestly harbour a feeling of sympathy and a sense of a certain almost personal closeness. Conrad was a man who moved with some prowess across linguistic borders, a talent I envy, finding myself in a similar situation. A Polish emigré (his original name in fact was Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski) and something of an adventurer, he settled at last with the resolve to professionally write in a foreign language. He only first started learning English in his twenties; but by his thirties he already managed to have his first works published and, with a fairly extensive list of novels and short stories, Conrad ranks with Vladimir Nabokov as another Eastern-European to have become a full-fledged classic author of the English speaking world.