Not So Ordinary

I've got precious little time to read at the moment in an increasingly busy final week of the term, but that hasn't stopped me reading The Secret Agent. I doubt that anything could hold me up for long given the hypnotic power of the novel. That same power accounts for why my reading has been slow - even now I've only just started the penultimate chapter in which Winnie Verloc meets the egregious Ossipon having run from the shop after killing the even more egregious Verloc. (But, then, who isn't egregious in this illuminatingly dismal tale?)

As I've been reading I've been trying to figure out in what ways Conrad's novel is so different from the rest of his work and, indeed, all other novels. I just can't think of an equivalent text in any sense. The closest I can get to identifying its very special character lies, I think, in the sheer ordinariness of the individuals represented. The thing is that somehow Conrad makes them larger than life, in an almost Dickensian sense, yet they remain entirely ordinary, drab, third-rate. Verloc is a monster, but a deeply shabby and unimpressive one. A novel centred around the exciting world of espionage contrives to be deeply unexciting, disappointingly tawdry, yet captivating.

I'm not at all sure Conrad knew what he was doing - the appended Author's Note of 1920 suggests not - but he did it with complete assurance from start to finish. There isn't a false note in the text. Genius at work.