Product Description

In the only novel Conrad set in London, "The Secret Agent" communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11111 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine in 1857 and grew up under Tsarist autocracy. In 1874 Conrad travelled to Marseilles, where he served in French merchant vessels before joining a British ship in 1878 as an apprentice. In 1886 he obtained British nationality. Eight years later he left the sea to devote himself to writing, publishing his first novel, <I>Almayer's Folly</I>, in 1895. The following year he settled in Kent, where he produced within fifteen years such modern classics as <I>Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent</I> and <I>Under Western Eyes</I>. He continued to write until his death in 1924.

Customer Reviews

A favourite classic
For some years, this intriguing novel has been a favourite of mine. Conrad leads the reader through a cunning series of plots and subplots, all the while creating an atmosphere of discontent and darkness. The distinct characteristics of Mr Verloc will interest and bemuse the reader for many hours along the main plot of this novel. Anarchy has never been so readily depicted in classic literature.

Precisely too many words
I read another review that describes Conrad's prose as dense, difficult and gorgeous. I'm not sure about the last adjective. This is Conrad at his most dense and difficult. Almost impenetrable, one might say. For the opposite end of his scale see the earlier Lord Jim or the later Shadow Line. They are light and breezy by comparison.

I read this book about two years ago and can hardly remember a thing about it. It has a memorable bomb scene in Greenwich Park. I can't even remember where the rest of it is set. Somewhere in the West End, maybe?

Conrad is an author I often hate to love, but find myself loving nonetheless. One thing I do like about him is that the sunny, tropical locations lighten the density and difficulty of the surface prose. It's like a dirty window looking onto a sunny day. But that's not right. There is somehting precise, almost surgical, about Conrad's prose that is far from 'dirty'. The Secret Agent, set in an almost Dickensian, misty, murky C19 London, doesn't have the appeal of these tropically-set works, anyway.

I'll probably come back to The Secret Agent one day, as I probably will Nostomo, his other supremely dense, difficult book.

Not all that simple
Conrad's prose is dense, difficult and gorgeous. Before you pick up a book like this, you need to prepare yourself for an author who will happily write eight pages or so of prose between two lines in a conversation and not apologise (in fact there is, as is customary for Conrad, a self-justifying foreword). Patience will reward you with a surprising and darkly humorous tale of anarchists learning that real sources of chaos, anarchy and violence have little to do with abstract ideas.

It's not much like Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is perhaps more important in the history of literature, but this is bigger, richer and more enjoyable. Read both.