by Joseph Conrad
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Product Description
Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.
Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town," a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Bleak, Mordant, Beautifully Written, Funny..., 2008-11-11
... and wildly under-appreciated, judging by the other reviews here on amazon! This is so archetypical a spy novel that frankly no other spy novel needed ever to be written. Conrad has said it all. It's tightly plotted, completely plausible except perhaps for a few too-convenient chance meetings on the street, and profoundly insightful into the "politics" of terror. And it's freshly pertinent, even to the point of including an inadvertent suicide bomber. There are no "good guys," it's true, and nobody of any alignment with impressive physical or mental abilities. Every single personage is physically, picturesquely grotesque, and every character considers himself cleverly invulnerable yet reveals himself to be irremediably foolish. The descriptions of these moral clowns and the deplorable world of mucky squalor and gilded corruption in which they move are the best writing, sentence by sentence, that Conrad ever did -- worthy of Dickens or Dostoyevsky. There's a sardonic, scornful humor in every scene, however grizzly. This is the darkest picture of human nature I've ever read. Even love and loyalty are degenerative psychoses. One expects a certain fatalistic pessimism from Conrad, sprawling across an ungainly plot, with complicated narrative overlays and ambiguous judgments. The Secret Agent is utterly different; it's as terse and unified as its subtitle claims; it's "a Simple Tale."
"Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law."
That's the first paragraph; if you don't already feel in the presence of a master of subtle indirection just from that much, perhaps you'll be as unresponsive to this great novel as the hapless fools would be who populate its pages.
Hitchcock made a film of it in the 1930s. I've never seen the film, but I can imagine that Hitchcock would have read the novel with sardonic glee and captured its humor. It's Hitchcock in prosody. Yo! Peeps, if I tell it's totally NOIR, will you give it a ride?
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Secret Agency, 2007-12-31
Conrad still suffers today from the same pigeon-hole that his writing was pounded into during his own lifetime. He is still seen as harbinger of distant seas, of the exotic, the foreign. He is best known for Heart of Darkness, a book immortalized in pop culture by Francis Ford Coppola's retelling of this long, tormented short story as a Vietnam epic in Apocalypse Now.
And yet, The Secret Agent is a book that rivals, if not matches or exceeds, that great horror of the English cannon. This is more than a novel about terrorism, this is a terrorist novel. It's a book about poverty and squalor, about the obfuscated struggles of humanity; it conspires to build our ideals into violent extremes, chipping at a suffering domesticity negotiated in silence, then lets them fall in the babble of gutted secrets. This violence is not thrusted upon us in a language that dazzles tired eyes with surreal distortions; Conrad's is a dark, brooding prose as tempered and inauspicious as blinding banalities of our daily lives, and it these complacencies that he uses to deliver an ultimate shock. Conrad aims here at the absolute vortex of the British Empire--really, of the entire West--at that crossroads between global politics and the most individual of covenants. The knowledge found there manifests a total psychological collapse, one that leaves the cruel mechanisms of reality horrifically untouched.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 It will not dissapoint you., 2007-05-27
Its important to remember, that the novel is written at a time when democracy is not exactly well spread through Europe, and most of the continental countries are having a hard time trying to understand why the English shelter anarchists and Marxists and even allow them to publish their works.
No doubt that Conrad met a few of them in literary or social circles and found them amusing in their contradictions. That is why the "criminal mastermind" Mr. Verloc is portrayed more as a very lazy bourgeois than someone whose mind is set upon creating the conditions to change society.
On the other hand, Conrad is faithful to its belief on the perennial existence if not preeminence, of a dark side of the soul in everyone. So the atmosphere in which every character dwells is gloomy, sad and purposefully shows that no motivation is really beyond a person's self interest, even if you claim that you are doing it for God and country, to save the planet or your mother.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 Great novel by Conrad, 2007-01-03
Anarchism was a big thing in the late 19th century and early 20th century (you can compare it with the situation of Islamic terrorism today). Several kings, presidents and other politicians were killed by anarchists during that epoch (US president McKinley and Austrian Empress Sissi was among them). Conrad's book is one of the best novels about the anarchist world, dealing with an anarchist cell working in London during that time. The protagonist, Verloc, is the head of the cell and also an informer for the police and an agent for an unnamed foreign country (thus, he is a triple agent) and his attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory ends tragically for an unwitting member of his family. Note: Conrad amusingly says in the prologue that he never personally met an anarchist himself, but the main story is based on real events he probably picked up from the press of the time.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A Prophetic Tale, 2006-09-06
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent brought up many interesting topics for discussion. The group of motifs Conrad chose to weave into his 1907 novel is highly political in nature: Anarchist views, science, capitalism, socialism, idealization, private ownership, poverty, the police, and possibly even Muslim extremism. For a novel written when it was, in many places The Secret Agent seemed an almost prophetic tale of Mr. Verloc, a secret agent in London.
Interestingly enough, its first prophetic topic is of great importance in today's terror-stricken world, the plot of the story centering mainly on an Anarchist terrorist plot to put one of their followers, Mr. Verloc, in charge of blowing up an observatory. His method of choice, the suicide bomber, is eerily familiar to today's reader. What makes this suicide bomber plot all the more interesting are the obscure details Conrad includes that led me to question whether Verloc and his family were, in fact, Muslim. In Sir Ethelred and the Assistant Commissioner's chapter ten discussion, the Assistance Commissioner's thoughts question the country's domestic policy and focus on his battle against the "paynim (heathen/Muslim) Cheeseman," which is Verloc. Toward the end, Conrad describes Mrs. Verloc as walking around town covered in black except for her eyes. These two details combine to add a Muslim thread to this already visionary terrorist suicide bombing plot in London, curiously reminiscent of recent world events.
Stevie's comments to Mrs. Verloc on the taxi were intriguing as well, receiving new life from the recent New Orleans natural disaster. Stevie's sympathy for the poor taxi driver and poor horse lead him to wonder why the police don't fight to stop injustice. Mrs. Verloc's response, "They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have" is followed by Stevie's question of "What, not even if they were hungry?" The way the media portrayed and the police responded to the "looting" in New Orleans was the answer to Stevie's question: "Yes, that's the police's job even if the poor are hungry."
The Secret Agent, even though nearly a century old, brings to the forefront topics that seem to our world today fairly new. The details connect with the reader because of their strange relevance, spurring conversation about the various topics listed above.
Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens
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