Adolf Verloc, anarchist and police informer in 1880s London, is ordered to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. The plot goes horrifically wrong. Conrad's 1907 novel is his darkest comedy, a portrait of revolutionary politics as farce, of marriage as mutual exploitation, of a city whose fog obscures all moral clarity. The structure is deliberately fragmentary, information withheld and revealed out of sequence. The Assistant Commissioner moving through London is Conrad's fl√¢neur. The ending is devastating.