The Secret Agent (Signet classics) [Paperback]

Joseph Conrad (Author), Frederick R. Karl (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Signet classics | Publication Date: November 1, 1983

One one of the great detective novels of all time, "The Secret Conrad", written in 1903, is a magisterial thriller of terrorists and police in London in the early years of the 20th century.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of Conrad's supreme masterpieces. . . .one of the unquestioned classics of the first order that he added to the English novel. --F. R. Leavis --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Book Description

The Secret Agent (1907) is a compelling tale of espionage and terrorism set in Edwardian London. This new edition is based on a painstaking comparison of the original manuscript of the work. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Signet Classics (November 1, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451524160
• ISBN-13: 978-0451524164
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,773,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Secret Agent, June 2, 2002

By 

mp - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel, "The Secret Agent," is a difficult little book. It's story is difficult and its characters are largely unpleasant. By difficult and unpleasant, I don't mean to say the novel isn't any good. Far from it. These terms I mean to denote the impenetrability of motive, of sense. The story of a group of anarchists, police, and a family caught in the middle in late Victorian England, "The Secret Agent" is far from Conrad's subtitle, "A Simple Tale". The novel, for me, is about hatred, mistrust, and breakdowns in communication.

"The Secret Agent" begins early one morning in 1886. Mr. Verloc, a secret agent for a foreign embassy, who lives in a small apartment with his wife Winnie, her mentally ill brother, Stevie, and their mother. Keeping an eye on a particularly ineffectual anarchist community in London, Verloc pretends to be an anarchist revolutionary himself. As the novel opens, Verloc is called in by his new employer Mr. Vladimir. Vladimir, discontented with the apparent lack of production out of his secret agent, and even further with the lackadaisical English police, wants Verloc to act as an agent provocateur, and arrange for a bomb to spur the English government to crack down on the legal system. As religion and royalty are, according to Vladimir, no longer strong enough emotional ties to the people, an attack must be made upon "Science," and he selects the Greenwich Observatory as the appropriate site for action.

The novel introduces us to a range of wholly unsympathetic characters. The anarchist collective roughly consists of "Doctor" Ossipan, who lives off his romantic attachments to women barely able to take care of themselves; "The Professor," explosives expert, who is so insecure, he is perpetually wired with a detonator in case he is threatened by police capture; and Michaelis, the corpulent writer, engaged upon his autobiography after a mitigated sentence in prison. Conrad's portrayal of this cabal is wholly ludicrous - a band of anarchists that are better at talking than doing anything to achieve their undeveloped goals. No better than these are their nemeses, the London police, here represented by Inspector Heat, who identifies so much with the common criminal element, you'd think he was one himself; and the Assistant Commissioner, who is so dissatisfied with his desk job, that he would do anything to get out on the streets - but not so ambitious as to upset his nagging wife and her social circle.

At the diffuse center, if it has one, of Conrad's novel, is the Verloc family, held together by ties no less tenuous and flimsy than any other community in the work. Verloc and his wife communicate and interact by monosyllables and the broken bell of their front door. Winnie Verloc knows nothing of her husband's secret life, and tries desperately to prevent him from taking offence at having to support her infirmed mother and practically useless brother by forming a society of admiration amongst them for her "good" husband. Lack of real communication and sympathy amongst the Verloc household is at the heart of Conrad's satire against late Victorian England.

As the Greenwich Bomb Outrage is an early, but central moment in the novel, it would not be spoiling anything to tell you that this is where Conrad really earns his paycheck. His mode of bringing all the disparate characters and subplots of the novel together throughout the rest of the book is both reminiscent of and radically undercutting the influence of Charles Dickens in Conrad's social critique. "The Secret Agent" is a clever novel, but exceptionally bleak. Thinking about other early 1900's British novels like Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh" or Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," Conrad's "The Secret Agent" is another of these works where a British writer tries to assess the state of the Empire in the aftermath of Victoria's demise - examining past follies to be overcome, and peering without optimism at what lies ahead.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inventive espionage thriller from the 1900s, November 15, 2000

By 

TheIrrationalMan - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (World's Classics) (Paperback)

The major event of the plot is an anarchist conspiracy to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. An "agent provocateur", Verloc, is the man caught in the middle, a pawn in a game played by a high-ranking Russian diplomat, a leading police inspector and, on the other side, the sometimes clumsy and ineffectual anarchists. One example of the characterisation immediately sticks in the mind of the reader, long after completing the novel. It is the character of the mysterious Professor, a misanthrope and angel of destruction, who supplies Verloc with the explosives needed to carry out the plot and who embodies nihilism at its most extreme. Joseph Conrad is known for his dense and sometimes contorted prose, and the style of "The Secret Agent" is no exception. Though no great storyteller, he nevertheless demonstrates that he is a psychologist of the first order, in his searching analyses of character and motive. The novel is partly a domestic tragedy, a highly innovative and experimental early Modernist work, a darkly humorous tale with lashings of "schadenfreude" and an esponage thriller that anticipates, in many ways, the best and most recent examples of the genre.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a grim view of the anarchists, November 2, 2004

By 

Kaleberg "one_kaleberg" (Port Angeles, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret Agent (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

This is a grim, gritty, cynical tale set in the world of the anarchists and secret agents around the start of the 20th century. There are no blind romantics, no overwhelming causes, and no anarchistic politics. As is often the case with Conrad, this is a story about people, people in an exotic world.

The setting is London, the crime an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The motives are far from pure: money, careerism, hack value, a peaceful mind. Mrs. Verloc, an anarchist's wife, is at the center of the tale. As Conrad tells us, and shows us repeatedly, she is not a woman to look beneath the surface of things, but she is a woman of some depth.

The story is sad. It is a tragedy, and the ending seems inevitable given the players Conrad has set in motion. This is probably appropriate given the subject matter.

The writing is excellent. The tale is well told. I would have given it a full five stars save for the sheer grimness of the tale. If you are a reader who gives extra points to depressing stories, you should consider this ranking a five.