Summaries and Critical Commentaries

Abstract

Verloc lives on the premises of his disreputable shop in Soho with his wife, Winnie, her mentally retarded brother, Stevie, and — until she decides to move to an almshouse — his mother-in-law. In fact, the shop is a ‘cover’ for Verloc’s real business: he is a secret agent who reports to a foreign embassy — and to a contact, Chief Inspector Heat, in the British police — on revolutionary and anarchist activity. Vladimir, a new hand at the (Russian) embassy, demands that, if Verloc is to remain in the pay of the embassy, he must take on a more active role as an agent provocateur. In order to force the British government into introducing repressive measures against the revolutionaries who find an easy refuge in England, Vladimir demands that popular feeling against them must be whipped up by the planting of a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory. Verloc, who has grown accustomed to his comfortable domestic niche and relatively undemanding employment, is reduced to despair by this proposal, for he knows that the revolutionaries with whom he associates, ineffectual men such as Michaelis, Yundt and Ossipon, are incapable of committing themselves to any concerted action of this kind. As a way out of his dilemma, Verloc trains Stevie to plant the bomb, but the young man botches the job and blows himself up in Greenwich Park.