Product Description

'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.' 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 critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79282 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Looking into another Heart of Darkness
Readers familiar with the work of Dostoevsky will find themselves in similar territory when embarking on 'The Secret Agent'. Apparently Conrad was hostile to Dostoevsky, although his antagonism may be indicative of Conrad's need to resist the influence of his predecessor to protect his own creative identity. There are clear parallels with the characters that populate tales such as 'The Devils', 'Notes From Underground' and 'The Idiot'

In 'The Secret Agent', Conrad presents an identity parade of the superfluous, from the fanatics that form the anarchistic netherworld around which the story oscillates, to the ludicrous image of the Home Secretary, a man so totally out of time that `The Great Personage might have been the statue of one of his own princely ancestors stripped of a crusader's war harness, and put into an ill-fitting frock coat.'

Even the parodically dank and ominous city that Conrad creates in the name of London seems derived from an anachronistic Dark Age than the modern capital of `the Empire on which the sun never sets'.

Notwithstanding Conrad's ironic intention, which he goes to great pains to stress in his introduction, to exemplify the mind-set of anarchists through the act of bombing the Greenwich observatory; `a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought', what emerges from the book is a misanthropy of a kind almost unparalleled in its thoroughgoing negativity. Even the shreds of human feeling felt by the female characters for the intellectually disabled Stevie are expressed negatively, as a desire to protect him from abandonment to the Workhouse. Stevie's own sense of right and wrong, whilst heartfelt, is invalidated by his inchoate reasoning and understanding of the world. What is truly horrifying in this novel is not the prophetic imagining of the modern suicide bomber that has been invoked by some commentators, but the sense that there is nothing beyond the alienation and anomie of modern society.

This is where Conrad differs from Dostoevsky. He rejects Dostoevsky for conjuring up the chaos of the modern world while propagandising for the forces of reaction, such as submission to autocratic benevolence and Orthodox Christianity. A wider reading of Conrad will lead to an appreciation that the alternative that he posits is to accept with stoic dignity the intractable nihilism of modern life, but in 'The Secret Agent', not even this faint consolation is on offer.