![]() Winnie’s tragedy steals up on you through the London fog – everywhere in the book, not yet seen on screen. The series seems to be opting for literalness and linearity – plus some invented business involving a manhunt for the bomb-making “professor” – and I wonder if the shock of the conclusion will be muffled. The novel achieves the shift of focus from Verloc to Winnie quite brilliantly, but that relies on us gradually discovering what really happened in Greenwich Park. Verloc has so far been treated as the central character and the bomb plot as the hinge of the drama, but Conrad was explicit that the novel’s moral centre was Winnie, and the way she had accepted a loveless marriage to provide for her brother Stevie. I’ve only seen the first episode, but I worry for the one-dimensionality of the series. So much is lost: the competitive, distrustful relationship between Chief Inspector Heat and the Met’s assistant commissioner Vladimir’s icy humour Verloc’s French background (I find Toby Jones’s Hoskins-type London accent irritating) the physical grotesqueness of the characters (in the book, Winnie’s mother’s legs are so fat she is completely immobilised, but on screen she is a young-looking, birdlike middle-aged woman) the laziness of the anarchists and their love of domestic order (hinted at in the series, but not made as explicit as in the book) the comedy around the “great personage” at the Home Office and his dislike of being burdened with details. So to have to start pinning everything down – his sense of being tortured because he is a double (indeed treble) agent, how Winnie feels about working in a 19th-century porn shop, the reason Winnie’s mother feels she has to move – undermines the Conradian worldview: that none of us knows anything, least of all about ourselves. ![]() We don’t really understand Verloc in the book, other than as a study in indolence and narcissism. ![]() Much of Conrad’s oddness as a novelist resides in his unwillingness to explain. He called the ill-fated terrorist attack “a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought”. Conrad based Verloc’s attempt to bomb the observatory on a real incident in which a half-baked anarchist blew himself up, and his description of it in a later preface to the novel should be the starting point for any treatment. You would never know from watching it that The Secret Agent is in some respects a funny book, certainly a deeply ironic one. Conrad’s great, strange, tonally complex novel is reduced to a psychological thriller. That, in essence, is the problem here: all the workings must be shown. The mystery, the enigma, the idea that an attack on the very idea of time is all that will shock the English middle class is lost. In the book, the first secretary makes a brilliant, witty, scathing case for attacking science – indeed, attacking time itself, since Greenwich marks the prime meridian – but on TV we have to be shown it. The embassy employs Verloc as an agent provocateur to encourage anarchists to commit atrocities that will in turn lead to a police crackdown in the UK (this is 1886 and Tsarist Russia is looking for reactionary allies). But, worse, Vladimir is taking Verloc to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which he thinks would be the perfect target for a terrorist attack. In this adaptation, the meeting begins in the office, but Vladimir then suggests they go for a ride – cue smart hansom cab, busy street scenes, vistas of London. The meeting goes badly, and you can feel Verloc getting angrier as it progresses, the office becoming more and more claustrophobic. The fireworks party – a way of introducing the family to us and spelling out Stevie’s mental infirmity – is an invention.Īll the time you can hear the programme-makers saying: “We really have to liven this up a bit.” There is a great scene in the book where Verloc, who is in the pay of a foreign embassy (we assume it to be Russian), has to meet the first secretary – a withering anglophile called Vladimir – in his office. Fireworks do feature in the novel but in a very different context – Stevie gets sacked when he sets them off at the office in which he is supposed to be working. We know immediately that liberties have been taken with the novel (nothing inherently wrong with that, of course) when we begin with a Guy Fawkes’ night firework display in the back garden of Verloc’s shop in London’s Soho.
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