Conrad's London, then as now (National Post, August 10, 2005)

National Post
August 10, 2005

At his recent trial, Mohammed Bouyeri, 27, a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent, who last year ghoulishly assassinated film-maker Theo Van Gogh, coldly addressed the victim's tormented mother: "I don't feel your pain ... because you're a non-believer," and "I would do it again." We hear his words but we find the mind that formed them incomprehensible.

For many wishful thinkers, seductive rationalizations centred on Iraq, Israel, neo-colonialism or global inequality explain such hatred and the locally cultivated terrorism it's spawned. But Bouyeri and the London bombers resist formulaic classification. Ironically, the most compelling profile of the homegrown terrorist was written almost 100 years ago, and not by a scientist, politician or academic, but by the politically unaligned novelist Joseph Conrad.

Terrorism was a natural subject for Conrad. From his legendary sea voyages into dangerous backwaters, notably the savage vortex of the Belgian Congo, Conrad took betrayal and man's corruptibility as his great themes ("the mind is capable of anything"). Intrigued by Freud's then freshly minted theories, Conrad broke new literary ground in applying revelations about the subconscious to examples of irreducible extremism, such as the famously barbarized Kurtz in his novel Heart of Darkness, upon which the 1979 film Apocalypse Now was based.

The plot of Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent, English literature's first political thriller, found its inspiration in a sensational news story. On the evening of Feb. 15, 1894, a man called Martial Bourdin was found dying in London's Greenwich Park, "in a kneeling posture, terribly mutilated," from a prematurely detonated bomb.

Bourdin's target, London's Greenwich Observatory, was a world-renowned icon of Western achievement in science and technology, Victorian London's symbolic precursor to New York's World Trade Center. It was later discovered that Bourdin had been set up by his brother-in-law, editor of an anarchist newspaper, who orchestrated the scheme and provided the bomb.

A post-7/7 reading casts The Secret Agent in an eerily prescient light. The novel's sudden relevance is most powerfully evoked in Conrad's animation of a tensely conjoined trio of cultural archetypes that has not changed in essentials since Victorian times: revolutionary ideologues, law enforcers and terrorists.

As they still do today, Conrad's Marxist ideologues hate the West, and advocate revolution; but, fundamentally gutless and indolent, they shrink from involving themselves in the attendant violence their intellectual abstractions tacitly endorse. His policemen, then as now "conscious of having an authorized mission on this earth and the moral support of [their] kind," are single-minded upholders of the law, democracy's bearing wall. Like Bouyeri and other jihadis, Conrad's suicidal terrorist is a narcissist "with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions" and a "moral attitude translated ... into a frenzied Puritanism of ambition ... absolute in [his] resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means [with] no pity for anything on earth, including [himself]."

The Secret Agent takes place in London, 1884, a city whose democratic freedoms facilitate the parasitic growth of a hostile, homegrown fellowship of revolutionaries. Pure theorists, their long-winded diatribes against the establishment never actually specify the parameters of the "just" society that would replace them.

The anarchist group at the centre of the plot meets at the home of an ostensible fellow conspirator, Mr. Verloc. But Verloc, who runs a pornography book store, is in fact a secret agent monitoring the anarchists' activities on behalf of the Russians

To discredit the anarchist cause and jolt England from her complacency -- "what [the British] want just now is a jolly good scare" -- Verloc's Russian handler dispatches him to engineer an act of "gratuitous blasphemy" in the anarchists' name, to bomb the Greenwich Observatory.

Following on the real-world news item on which The Secret Agent was based, Verloc uses Stevie, his wife's mentally retarded brother, as an unwitting mule for the bomb, which explodes prematurely when Stevie trips. Chief Inspector Heat takes up the hunt for Stevie's murderer, only to discover that Verloc is actually a double agent selling secrets to the British.

On the subject of terrorism, the most interesting characters are: Ossipon, the "scientific" revolutionary, and leader of the anarchist circle; Chief Inspector Heat; and most indelibly for the reader, a fearless, solitary fanatic called "The Professor," a portrait of anarchy taken to its logical conclusion in suicidal terrorism.

The Marxist Ossipon's discourse is comically recognizable to anyone who has studied the dogmatic babble of left-wing academics. The Professor, an anarchist analogue of today's Islamist suicide bombers, is far scarier. He prowls London's back alleys, swathed in home-made explosives, constantly caressing a small rubber ball in his pocket in which a detonator is enclosed. He is, in Chief Inspector Heat's assessment, a "mad dog to be left alone."

Middle-class, educated, the Professor lives in self-imposed poverty. He harbours no specific national or religious grudges. Rather, he is a social misfit, a psychological outsider with grievances rooted in an ascetic upbringing by an authoritarian father. Fanaticism, according to Conrad, is never about political woes, but always embedded in the personal: "The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds".

The Professor is a seething mass of inchoate hatred, who delights in his nihilism: "[Law-abiding] character is built upon conventional morality. It leans on the social order. Mine stands free ... They depend on life [and are] open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident."

He reveals his twisted ambitions in debates with Ossipon that resemble those that might unfold today between suicidal jihadis and their left-wing apologists who, though sympathetic to the terrorists' purported grievances, cannot bring themselves to embrace their tactics. As they both wish to overturn the prevailing order, they should be allies, but the revolutionary acknowledges there are limits to destructive behaviour, while the Professor recognizes no bounds. He is contemptuous of those who stop short of murdering innocents: "You revolutionaries are slaves of the social convention ... since you want to revolutionize it ... But I am not taking my cue from the Red Committee. I would see you all hounded out of here ... or beheaded for that matter - without turning a hair. What happens to us as individuals is not of the least consequence."

The rather stupid and dogged Chief Inspector Heat is emblematic of England's -- and, in our own day, America's -- anti-intellectual but muscular moral clarity. (Conrad, a grateful immigrant from unstable Poland, considered England a force for good, and more benign to its colonies than other imperial nations.)

Ordinary criminals Heat understands. They were simply "his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education." They were "sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constitutional authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair." Criminals understood society's rules and played the game. But the Professor unsettled him. "The perfect anarchist was not recognized as a fellow creature by Chief Inspector Heat."

Conrad saw terrorists as formidable threats to the common weal, but placed his hope in the moral solidarity and "unattackable stolidity of a great multitude" as a means of containing them. He couldn't possibly have envisaged the modern spectacle of one "Professor" metamorphosing into a whole phalanx churned out in foreign training camps, or groups of "useful idiots" like Stevie popping up in a Leeds Islamic community centre.

Nor could he imagine that the teeming intellectual progeny of Ossipon and his tiny cadre of anti-establishment malcontents would, 100 years on, walk the West's corridors of power in academia and the media, their alienation from the achievements of their own heritage quickening the resolve of homegrown enemies who map and probe the fissures in their hosts' self-respect and pluck, patiently awaiting their moment:

"And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable -- and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on, unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men."

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Conrad's London, then as now (National Post, August 10, 2005)