The Secret Agent Rules and Order Quotes

There's nothing Verloc values more than his ability to live a lazy and privileged life. In this passage, Conrad comes closest to giving Mr. Verloc an ethos or moral code of some kind. Verloc believes that he's part of something beyond himself: a social effort to protect the privileged people from all the filthy beggars. The tone of the book really doesn't seem to be on Verloc's side, though. The narrator has just called him a fat pig, and has suggested that his laziness is something the maybe he shouldn't be allowed to get away with. Just maybe.

In describing his plans to Verloc, Mr. Vladimir explains that in order to freak out English society, someone has to do something that totally makes no sense. When people can explain something in everyday terms, that thing doesn't have a big impact. When something awful happens that makes no sense at all, though, people start standing up and shouting for something to be done. The logic is similar to the Professor's. Like Vladimir, the Professor knows that if you want to really shake things up, you've got to do something that totally shatters peoples idea of how things are supposed to go. This is why the Professor has such a deep impact on Inspector Heat.

Here, the Professor tells Ossipon that the United States is a better place than England because the United States (according to him) is basically a lawless place. The Professor admits that if he tried his bomb-tricks in the U.S., he'd probably get shot in the head. The reason this doesn't happen in England is because English society still believes in the ideals of law and order. The Professor, and possibly the book as well, believes that the America of 1886 was still pretty much the Wild West. The Professor speaks of this with approval, since in a place like America, the weak people get weeded out by the strong.

In speaking to Ossipon, the Professor reveals what is probably the biggest ace up his sleeve. When Ossipon tells the Professor that a cop could probably shoot him without giving him time to set off his bomb, the Professor says that he wishes this would happen, because then the police would no longer be working with a false idea of law and order. They would embrace anarchy and just start shooting anyone they didn't like the look of. In this case, the Professor character could easily be the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Joker.

Here, Heat is confident that the majority of society is on his side. Most people like the fact that life is governed by a clear set of rules, and Heat enjoys working with the support of the majority. Even the thieves, it seems, are with him when it comes to dealing with nuts like the Professor. Thieves make sense because the law has clear rules for dealing with them. They want what everyone else wants; they just choose unconventional ways of getting it. The Professor, on the other hand, can't be bought off with money or goods. He actually seems quite happy about being poor. What he wants is to know that he can't be touched.

Chief Inspector Heat has no problem with criminals. After all, he wouldn't have a job without them. And the thing he loves most about his job is the thrill of the hunt, as long as the hunt takes place inside a really clear set of rules (don't try talking if you ever play Pictionary with him). People like the Professor, though, threaten Heat's whole world because they don't really make sense to him. There are no rules for dealing with the Professor, because the Professor doesn't acknowledge the law. Here, Conrad shows us that the ideals of justice and order are much more fragile than we might think.

Again, we get a sense that Conrad's exploring how the human mind tries to deal with things that aren't quite normal. Chief Inspector Heat is a good cop who enjoys his job because there are certain "rules to the game." But the Professor isn't after money or any of the stuff that criminals usually want. He can't be bought off with money or even fame. He wants the social order to collapse, partly because of his pride, and maybe even because he's really bored. Heat knows the Professor wants him to step outside the rules of the game; but Heat won't take the bait. He believes in the rule of law, and plans on one day arresting the Professor in the proper way. Then again, he might just be terrified of the little dude.

Heat reveals to the Assistant Commissioner that for years, he's been using Verloc as his personal Wikipedia of secret information. The Assistant Commissioner thinks it would've been better to do things by the book and bring Verloc in as an official informer. But Heat feels he can do his job much better by bending the rules a little. In this sense, his unwavering belief in rules seems to take a little vacation, since he feels like he's got the right to do whatever it takes to get results. In this case, Conrad might be pointing out Heat's hypocrisy, or might actually be siding with Heats point of view.

Here's how committed Heat is to getting the results he wants. In fact, he's totally willing to send Michaelis to jail for a crime he had nothing to do with, just for the sake of preserving the status quo. For Heat, the truth doesn't even matter—what matters is preserving the social order and the rules that govern it, which means meeting people's expectations and giving the simplest possible answers to problems whenever you can.

The Assistant Commissioner hates the fact that he's got foreign embassies sending their spies all through his city, and he takes this opportunity to gloat in Mr. Vladimir's face and tell him that he's going to completely throw everyone like Vladimir out of England. For the Assistant Commissioner, there's only one sheriff in town, and anyone else trying to do the job of the London police is only going to cause problems. It seems like we're supposed to take his side here, since Mr. Vladimir is a bad dude, and its pretty cool to see him come down a peg or two.