Really helps to read the novel

Such a dark and tragic subject built upon malevolent irony and merciless chain of events. At the beginning it almost reads as a farce of political intrigue it's so twisted. But that background fades once set up to the real story: a frightening look into the crushed hopes of a passionately protective sister of Stevie. Because of Winnie's fierce and singular intentions from childhood to sacrifice for her abused brother, she adopts a total blind spot to everything surrounding her domestic life with the agent Verloc. She decides that "life doesn't stand much looking into" and proceeds to shut down large swaths of herself in the false hope that that is what is required. Unfortunately she disables her natural instincts in the process and loses her Stevie to the plot of the very man she believes can insure a future for him.
The lie of her life gets exposed in the very same instant it literally blows to pieces in an inept and unfathomable purpose to blow up the Prime Meridian. She indeed finds that life surely doesn't stand much looking into, loses what is left of the core of her being and is left with only her fierceness to consumate the union with Verloc through his quick murder and her desolate suicide to avoid the gallows, her only fear left.
Conrad had no patience for such senselessness. He writes well about it and even apologizes for the choice of a subject matter so superficially squalid and tragic. But his purpose remains true to expose so much that may well be hidden from the official reports of obscurely singular events. Not to explain or in anyway rationalize, but to grant the reader a chance to imagine that there are stories that never get told or will ever get told surrounding the innocent domestic lives that get crushed through the folly and even evil forces coalescing around the world of fanatical ideals.