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    The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale
    The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale
    The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale
    Ebook324 pages5 hours

    The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale

    By Joseph Conrad

    3.5/5

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    This is Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel, "The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale". Set in London in 1886, it concerns Mr. Adolf Verloc, a spy who works for an unknown country. The novel is significant as it was one of Conrad's later political novels, representing a divergence from his earlier stories of seafaring. "The Secret Agent" deals with ideas of anarchism, terrorism, espionage, and exploitation. Modern Library ranked it the 46th most significant novel of the 20th century and, due to its themes, was one of the most referenced novels in American media subsequent to the 9/11 attacks. Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924) was a Polish-British writer considered to be amongst the greatest novelists in the English language. Other notable works by this author include: "Heart of Darkness" (1899), "Nostromo" (1904), and "Under Western Eyes" (1911). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherConrad Press
    Release dateFeb 16, 2017
    ISBN9781473350472
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Polish-born Joseph Conrad is regarded as a highly influential author, and his works are seen as a precursor to modernist literature. His often tragic insight into the human condition in novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent is unrivalled by his contemporaries.

    Read more from Joseph Conrad

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    Reviews for The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Re-reading, and maintains the ability to stun on the 3rd or 4th time through.
    • 4/5
      Just in case you think there's something new under the sun, here's a book published in 1907 about fanatical outcasts in a modern who live in a lonely, dirty modern hellscape that dream of committing random acts of terrible violence. More than a hundred very bloody years later, it's interesting to see how much about the way we think about terrorism hasn't changed: the novel's radicals, who range from gormless idealists to bloodthirsty maniacs, seem like recognizable archetypes that might have been found in any of the last century's underground movements. In a titled lady's fawning over a certain incomprehensible, childlike anarchist, a bit of radical chic here. Throughout the novel, Conrad takes pains to illustrate, in turn, their poverty of spirit and their inevitable hypocrisy. It's all horribly familiar. It's also a bit strange to see Joseph Conrad tell a story that has so little do with boats: the only water here seems to fall, interminably, from the gray London sky. It's also weird to see him, in his formal, finely tuned, way, take a decidedly ironic tone. Awful as they are, this novel's terrorists are mostly walking contradictions: for all their grand ideas, they're pitifully flawed humans, as lazy self-seeking, and comfortably bourgeois as the next guy. Conrad deals with their contradictions expertly, and while there aren't any really funny moments here, there's a lot of black comedy to be had. The book's title might refer to a specific character, but absolutely in the book seems to be living a double life, and most of them are at least dimly aware of it. The book has other strengths, including a wonderfully detailed picture of a dreary, dirty Victorian London that may interest readers of historical fiction, but it's big weakness is its tempo. Sentence-for-sentence, Conrad might have been one of the finest authors English has ever produced, but nobody's ever accused him of taking shortcuts. While most of the book's action takes place on a single day, it seems like forever. One can see why the spy novelists that wrote after "The Secret Agent" chose to tell their stories in lean, hard-edged, colorfully profane prose: the author's verbosity, skillful as it is, drains most of the mystery and the fun out of this story. This criticism may be unfair. While his subject matter might make him an obvious inclusion in any "Boy's Own Stories" compilation, I doubt that Conrad was trying to write genre fiction. While this isn't a particularly readable book, more than a century after it was published, it remains a sharply observed and superbly written study in human weakness, political fanaticism, and basic hypocrisy.
    • 5/5
      My best friend Joel has a friend Bob who teaches at Rutgers. Nearly a decade ago, before becoming a scholarly expert on Borat, he stated that in terms of literature he wasn't going to bother with anything written later than 1920; what was the point, he'd quip? I admired his pluck. While I'm not sure he still ascribes to such. Well, for a couple of weeks in 2004 I adhered to the goal. There have been many goals with a similar history and such a sad conclusion: sigh. This was my first effort towards that goal and what an amazing novel it is.

      The Secret Agent is the dark reversal of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. The devices employed are grim and effective. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Mr. Verloc leads a double life as a spy and a business owner, and lives with his wife Winnie, his mother-in-law and Stevie, a mentally disabled brother of his wife. Immersed in a social circle of anachists, Mr. Verloc is pushed to become involved in a daring plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in London. When things take a brusque turn, the reader begins his/her dark descent into depths of the human mind. It was probably my mistake for choosing this book to start my experience of Conrad’s writing, as he is known for his other works and I am not naturally called to the themes of espionage or politics to begin with. But what’s done is done – I wanted to get ahead on my English literature syllabus so I did what I did. If there is anything you must know, it is that the second half of the book is quite a change (for the better) from the first half. Overall, I found this book to be far too tedious for my taste, with a long-winded prose that failed to present anything spectacular before my eyes, but the novel was saved by Conrad’s expansion of Mrs. Verloc’s character in the second half, as it makes for a fascinating read and provides a fresh new perspective after the sudden plot-twist. I realize that Conrad’s works frequently dabble in the evils of man, but I found that The Secret Agent failed to really make me feel anything about it. His prose is lyrical, but lacks the coherence and power of a unified force – it drawls on and on. Take this sentence for example: “The shattering violence of destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless fragments affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of lightning” (44). I frequently found the voice in the back of my head retorting “so what?” to similar sentences. There is a lot that can be shown with silence or absence, most definitely, but unlike other writers I have read, Conrad fails to flesh out the relevant emotions and truths about our existence (and instead, just vaguely points to their shadow) thereby making his writing (or at least that which is captured in this book) underdeveloped in my book.
    • 3/5
      Bijwijlen hilarisch verhaal van een groepje anarchisten die in Londen een spraakmakende aanslag willen plegen op het Greenwich Observatorium. Moeilijk boek, niet zozeer om de gewone modernistische aanpak, wel om de verregaande introspectie (zeer traag). Nadruk op het kijken van Verloc naar Stevie, waarbij het maar heel traag tot hem doordringt welk nut de jongen voor hem kan hebben; Winnie kijkt heel anders
    • 3/5
      The Secret Agent is another Conrad mystery, great for descriptions of locale and depth of characters, but slow and weak with plot.Once again, there was no character whose fate readers might connect to or care about.
    • 4/5
      There may have been a time, long before this book was written, when its darkly comic vision of politics, revolutionaries, and law enforcement didn't apply. But I doubt there has been a time since. No one understood the dark intersection of politics, money, power, and love quite like Joseph Conrad. Since the moment that the man on the street gained enough power to have an opinion, politics (being all local) has wormed its way into every corner of our lives, and Conrad does a wonderful job of examining those motives. Unlike Sinclair or Rand, however, Conrad's style is not distant or didactic. In fact, the lens can often be so close as to slow the pacing. A very timely book, ahead of its time.
    • 5/5
      Like Heart of Darkness, Secret Agent:

      - Is deeply cynical
      - And heavily allegorical
      - And ends with a bang (although this book also begins with one).

      I guessed a big part of the plot pretty quickly, so I guess that's a negative...although I'm not sure it was supposed to be hard to guess.

      It's about a cheerful, indolent secret agent who's pressed by his superiors to do something big to prove his worth. Complications ensue. And there's a guy who goes around strapped with enough explosives to blow everyone around him to smithereens, and a little rubber bulb in his pocket to trigger it, so no one has the balls to arrest him. I love that guy.
    • 4/5
      This is a random read from the "1001 books you should read before you die"-list, so I knew nothing about this book other than its title. I started reading, and from the start I really didn't like it. In fact, I actively disliked it. I found the first half of the book to be a muddled and messy blend of politics, social commentary, satire and attempts at humour. As standalone elements all of these would probably have held up, but the way in which they were blended together made the story confusing, really hard to read, and disagreeable to me. Considering how little was actually happening, it was baffling how hard it was to keep up with it.Then everything changed.The mood of the book changed drastically. The relatively lighthearted, almost superficial, story turned dark. It became intense, emotional and gripping. One passage in particular, which takes up most of the second half of the book, had me completely gripped. The situation isn't particularly dramatic, but the way in which it is recounted is extremely immersive. After reading it I felt like I'd been holding my breath for a few hours. A lot of time is spent describing a very sort passage of time, yet not a word is wasted. One of the characters is in an extremely fragile emotional state, and as they get closer and closer to the edge, I found myself dreading what would happen when they fell off it. But I had to know. I had to continue reading. Way past when I should have gone to sleep.Concluding anything about this book is very difficult. Perhaps the start of the book was necessary for the rest of it to be so good. Maybe the contrast in mood and tone is what made the book have such an impact on me. I'm not sure whether I'd recommend it or not. I really, really didn't enjoy the first part of the book, and I'm finding it hard to describe how much I enjoyed the last part. Take from that what you will.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing. About anarchist terrorists in London around the end of the 19th century, but one hears little concrete of either anarchism or terrorism, only about the not too interesting characters. One of the characters is supposed to have been an inspiration for the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.
    • 3/5
      I wish I had read this in the early years after 9/11. While the characters in Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" are not superficially the same as the characters that would figure into the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent events, the themes are eerily similar.

      As a piece of literature, though the book is an almost surreal set of disjointed pieces. Each chapter is a different view, through a different set of eyes, and only by looking at them all in turn does the mystery unfold. Methodically, Conrad unfolds each participants thoughts in slow motion, and while he demonstrates a command of the English language that is enviable, as well as a vocabulary that would be substantial for a native speaker and even more so for a sailor whose native tongue was Polish, the slow pace demands a serious reader's attention and patience. You get a full picture in the reading, but you look at every details that unfolds.

      And yet, plodding as the pace is, there are surprises. After pages of slow, deliberate character development, a sudden jolt of action with shift the plot, especially as the personal consequences of the underlying act of terror begins to turn the characters in on each other. In this regard, one sees echoes of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or even Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" in the inescapable maelstrom that drags down all who are touched by violent men and violent actions.

      Is it heavy, then? Undeniably. Worth the effort? Without question, it is an interesting and fascinating read, and Conrad's prescience, decades before the onset of the terrorism's "golden age," is itself an argument for reading "The Secret Agent."

      Just don't pick it up expecting James Bond. He's not here.
    • 3/5
      A pretty cool Conrad story, and refreshing in that it's not about some guy on a boat.
    • 2/5
      This was kind of interesting in one way that I didn't at all expect, and mostly uninteresting in the aspects that I expected to like. It is famous as a prototype of the political thriller genre, and certainly a lot of the familiar themes are there, but the narrative structure is completely different. To the extent that it fits into any genre, this book plays out more like a murder mystery, and even in that context the plot unfolds in a strange way. One major event happens about a quarter of the way through the book, and everything after that revolves around the characters (and the reader) trying to figure out what exactly that major event was. The novelty of Conrad's approach, or at least the divergence from my expectations, lent the book some interest to me; however, it wasn't enough to make this an especially compelling experience overall.

      What Conrad has to say about political extremism may have been good for the time, but I feel like our current geopolitical climate has led to some more nuanced explorations. At least, we've now had more time to think about terrorism. This book seems to hinge around the thesis that ideologies are little more than high-minded justifications for baser psychological impulses like greed and sexual inadequacy. I think there is quite a bit of truth to that, but it really isn't exciting or complex enough of an insight to successfully anchor an entire novel.
    • 3/5
      Far better than expected, some of the interior monologue was just fantastic. Extra points because terrorism, counter-espionage and the manipulation of public opinion thereon is so damn timely.
    • 3/5
      Reading The Secret Agent is work. It takes effort to follow Conrad's unconventional use of English. It takes effort to understand where the plot is going. I'll be honest—it takes effort to pick the book up of the night stand and read another chapter!Just when I was preparing to dismiss this book, I made it to the last three chapters. If the whole book was as psychologically profound and tense as these chapters, Conrad would have had something!In the end, it was too little too late. I can't recommend reading this book. I can't even understand why it made it into the ranks of Everyman's Library.
    • 3/5
      It seemed very well written ... but very hard to follow. I read two or three books at one time and I think it would be best to read this one cover to cover alone. I really had a hard time getting through it.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Verloc is a Russian secret agent keeping a shop in London where he lives with his wife, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother. Mr. Verloc has become comfortable and lazy in his role, but the Russian ambassador insists on action. Verloc puts together a bomb plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and implicate the anarchists, but things go disastrously wrong. This novel is said to be the precursor of the espionage thriller. While it was very subdued compared to the modern thriller, I found it to be pretty engrossing. It was interesting to see the motivations the characters had for their actions and the how the unforeseen affects of the bombing played out in so many lives.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. The modernity of it surprised me. Conrad had a good grasp of human nature. His rich prose brings late 19th century London to life, and the intrigues of the life of a secret agent are as well drawn as anything written by John Le Carré almost 100 years later.
    • 5/5
      A few years ago I began a personal tradition of starting each year's reading with a reread of a Joseph Conrad novel. This year it was The Secret Agent, a book I did a massive amount of research about during my grad school days. The book, set in London in late 19/early 20th century, tells the story of Adolph Verloc, who is too indolent to work and so makes his living in the employ of an Eastern European embassy, spying on London's anarchists. When Verloc's employer puts pressure on him to create an anarchist outrage so that a too tolerant English society will decide to crack down on the anarchists in their midst, Verloc's troubles begin. We also follow at times the anarchists themselves and the police. But this is really only the framework for a broader portrayal of the ways in which Conrad saw the growing industrialization and impersonality of society as a destroyer of hope, incentive and emotion and as a promoter of alienation and despair. At the center of these themes are Verloc's home life, and especially the ways in which his wife has married him as a form of personal compromise, away from happiness but for security for herself, her indigent mother and her mentally challenged brother. But Conrad's themes are equally evident in his descriptions of the city itself, its filth, slime and darkness. Also, very unusual for its time was Conrad's bending of time, showing us important episodes out of chronological order in ways that make us feel that time itself is standing still.Conrad had nothing but contempt for anarchists, and to a lesser degree for politics as a whole. He saw anarchists as parasites, people looking to tear down, but not to contribute to the daily business of getting along and getting on with life. Conrad, after all, came of age on merchant ships, a world where each man depended for his life on the other fellow doing his job all the time, and where even the most menial task could be crucial. But that level of contempt is the book's flaw, as Conrad let his antipathy run away with him, here. Consequently, the anarchists come off as mere caricatures, and the narrative loses power when they take center stage. As always, though, I am in love with Conrad's turn of a phrase and with his powers of observation.
    • 5/5
      Despite its name, this is not a James Bond type story. First of all, it is set in 1880s London and involves a small group of mostly ineffectual anarchists. Secondly, the primary characteristic of the main "secret agent" is laziness! Conrad gives us wonderful portraits of these disaffected men, each of whom is disgruntled for different reasons, as well as the rest of the Verloc family.

      As I was reading this, I kept having the sensation of deja vu. I knew that I had never read this before, but certain aspects were extremely familiar to me and in one important part I knew in advance what was coming. Finally I realized that Alfred Hitchcock had based one of his early movies - Sabotage - on this book! I am a big fan of Hitchcock (and have seen Sabotage more than once), but although his movie is quite exciting (even more thrills than the book), it doesn't capture Conrad's characters and has a completely different (and more conventional) ending. The book features complex characters and motivations which are perhaps slower and less exciting but will stay with me longer.
    • 4/5
      As fan of both Joseph Conrad and the spy novel, my biggest complaint about The Secret Agent is that it was oversold as containing insights into 9/11 and the mechanics of terrorism. The Secret Agent is a good spy story (not great) and the writing is perhaps not quite as dense as vintage Conrad can be. This reader did not, however, perceive any particular insights into 9/11 (unless one thinks it really was an inside job).The story is set in London in 1907. The spy Verloc is double-agent for an unspecified country, presumably Russia, and a member of a small anarchist group. As might be guessed, the characters comprising the anarchists are idiosyncratic to the point of eccentricity. Some members are merely playing, others enjoy the sound of their own voice a bit too much, and one enjoys mixing chemicals to create explosives. At bottom, these anarchists are ineffectual – much talk and little action. Verloc’s only income besides his pay as an agent provocateur comes from a sleazy little shop where he sells odds-and-ends – and pornography. Vladimir, who runs Verloc out of the unnamed embassy, threatens to cut Verloc off unless he carries out a magnificent operation. The story alternatively centers around Verloc’s rather odd home life as much as his career as a spy. His wife has married him so that she and especially her developmentally disabled brother Stevie will have some security. When Verloc involves Stevie in the terrorist operation the tale begins its hectic and exhilarating run to the finish.Conrad weaves an interesting tale of political intrigue and psychological insight. To my eye, the book offers only some insight into the way governments deal with terrorist threats and very little of use in understanding the nature of current threats. Reviewers who rediscovered the book after 9/11 larded the book down with rather grandiose claims of prophetic visions. In the Secret Agent, Conrad gave us a good read (probably a very good read at the time of its writing) and one that belongs on the bookshelf with other notable spy literature (like Smiley's People, Kim (Penguin Classics), Red Gold: A Novel and The Human Factor by Graham Greene to name only a few). That should be enough for anyone.
    • 4/5
      A very interesting read. Conrad's style meanders around the plot beautifully, following one character to another, and around until it finally reaches the point. In a story about anarchists, the flow of the book works very well. In the hands of a lesser writer, I would complain that the book was too long for such a simple tale, but Conrad handles the leangth quite well, and I have no such complaint.
    • 5/5
      Leopards might not change their spots – but works of literature can certainly change their meaning.Once this was a stylish novel of superior language use, playing with the genre of spies and flooring the ‘le Carrés’ of the future before they even put pen to paper.Well defined major characters and good descriptions – Dickensian almost but nodding to the modern.This time it was a vicious (as only humour can be vicious) satire on certainties and politics.In a world of ocean sized deceit, where atrocities and terrorism originate in ones friends and where one does not really know ‘the enemy’, small lives are wrecked leaving little flotsam to wash ashore.Winnie, whose story this is, is as tragic a figure as you will find in any ‘Bodice Ripper’ – she marries, for the sake of her family, the safe middle class man who lodged with her mother; her mother leaves in order to safeguard the prospects of an idiot son; the son, brother to Winnie, is hardly noticed by Verloc, double agent for a seedy government, until he is pressured to breaking point by an enthusiastic know-nothing (young, First Secretary, Mr Vladimir).No one is to blame – next to nothing happens, but a devastating hole is cut out in the reader’s faith in the essential goodness of the universe.The terror comes with the realisation this is our world – this is the manipulation of modern governments and those agencies set up to protect us – Nothing has changed: If anything, it is more like this than it was at the time of writing.
    • 4/5
      It took me a long time to read "The Secret Agent," and I don't know precisely why. It's a great book - a true classic, with hardly a sentence that one would chose to edit out - but it was heavy going at times and so dense with literary intent. As an examination of an attempted bomb-plot, and the fall-out that insued, it is masterful.
    • 4/5
      The blurb on the back of this book speaks of "ruthless irony" and "black satire", and it's not wrong. When I first read it last year I wasn't too impressed, being, perhaps, not in the mood to appreciate the said "ruthless irony" and "black satire". I'm pleased, therefore, that I put it aside for a future re-read instead of just releasing it at the time.Conrad's portraits and depictions of his motley group of anarchists and revolutionaries are devastating. Verloc, supposedly a ruthless terrorist but in reality is a double-agent, is motivated above all with protecting his domestic comfort but succeeds only in blowing it, along with his half-witted brother-in-law, to smithereens.The Professor, a walking bomb filled with contempt and venom for all and sundry and forever declaiming the need to kill and destroy anything and everything, is a pathetic, lonely, bitter little man who will never do anything except fulminate and sneer.Ossipon, seducer and swindler of women and dedicated to living off others like any other social parasite, an opportunist whose too late discovery of the ghost of a conscience leaves him fighting off incipient madness.Michaelis, possibly the most humble and self-effacing revolutionary ever (if that's OK by you), flabby in mind and body and in effect a pacifist.Ironically only the repressed hysteric Winnie Verloc, utterly focused since childhood on protecting and mothering the half-witted Stevie and convinced that "things do not bear looking into", proves capable of deliberately killing another human being and it is precisely that repressed hysteria which triggers the act of killing which also causes her to immediately collapse in a paralysis of terror.
    • 3/5
      A college professor once explained to me the brilliant structure and thematic intent of Conrad's "The Secret Agent." I was capitvated by his discourse, so I immediately went out and read the book. What a disappointment.This, alas, is another Guilty Displeasure.Well, not wholly displeasure, and not wholly guilty.I failed to see any "metaphysical interest" in the book, and the structure of this stated "simple story" was not really all that impressive. It is evocative, though, and the parts that kept my interest were very good. But it went on too long, and did not strike me as a very impressive revelation about the mind of a terrorist and saboteur.The Hitchcock movie of this book, "Sabotage," is one of the better of his early sound pictures, though perhaps a failure overall.
    • 5/5
      Spy thriller that clearly heavily influenced le Carre. I really enjoyed the slow burn into incandescence.
    • 4/5
      The first great spy thriller; the granddaddy of George Smiley and the like. Great! Could have done without the film with Bob Hoskins and Robin Williams, however. :)
    • 2/5
      The last three chapters were the only ones I didn't have to literally force myself to read, but they by no means made the book worth reading.
    • 4/5
      While Joseph Conrad wrote this novel more than a century ago and the story is set in London in 1886, it is still timely with the predominance of terrorism in the news today. The novel deals largely with the life of one Mr. Verloc and his job as a spy interacting with secretive agencies and groups. Moving away from tales of the sea Conrad had begun to write more political novels focusing on contemporary themes of which The Secret Agent is a notable example. The novel deals broadly with the notions of anarchism, espionage, and terrorism. At the end of the Nineteenth century England, with its relative political freedom, had developed as a haven for radicals and other expatriates from the continent. Conrad leans on this to portray anarchist or revolutionary groups before many of the social uprisings of the twentieth century. The plot to destroy Greenwich is in itself anarchistic. Vladimir asserts that the bombing "must be purely destructive" and that the anarchists who will be implicated at the architects of the explosion "should make it clear that [they] are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation." However, the political form of anarchism is ultimately controlled in the novel: the only supposed politically motivated act is orchestrated by a secret government agency. I believe that in his own subtle was Conrad is successful in building suspense while slyly ridiculing the questionable activities of the anarchist secret agent. While the novel is based on a true story I nonetheless enjoyed reading and wondering - would the bombing of Greenwich Observatory succeed? More recently, The Secret Agent is considered to be one of Conrad's finest novels. I enjoyed it as a novel about the city of London in a "City Literaryscapes" class at the University of Chicago, while the New York Times sees it as "the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism". It is considered to be a "prescient" view of the 20th century, foretelling the rise of terrorism, anarchism, and the augmentation of secret societies.

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    The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale - Joseph Conrad

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