Customer Reviews

The Secret Agent

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

Surely one of the greatest books I've ever read, The Secret Agent is a horrifying, oppressively bleak, vastly entertainly masterpiece that sets out to explain the absurdity of any form of political fanaticism. No one is justified in this novel and the pathetic results of the high-minded ideals of every character in the book unlines the nature of both order and anarchy.

I do not wish to sully my reading experience with one of the usual, piece-by-piece soliloquys. Conrad is better than me--

For all the talk of the supposed "difficulty" of this novel, I found it to be one of the best construed and told that I have read lately. It goes well beyond a simple thriller or spy novel; it is an intense human drama in which the characters have real personalities. Verloc is a loser. He has been living, for the last eleven or so years, off the payments of a foreign embassy which employs him to spy and report on the activities of a terrorist cell, also composed of frustrated, useless, all-talk-no-action losers. Other reviewers have aptly described these characters.

Verloc lives also off the meager profits of a news store, which serves as cover up for his clandestine activities, ignored even by his family. This consists of his younger wife, Winny, her mother and her retarded brother Stevie, a sympathetic but hopeless young man.

As the novel opens, Verloc is in deep trouble. The new officers at the embassy are displeased at the results Verloc's work has achieved, and so one of them brutally warns him that the pay will stop if he doesn't produce at least one major act of terrorism, say, blow up the Greenwich observatory, an icon of modern faith in science. Verloc gets obviously dismayed at this order, for he is no terrorist at all, just a scumbag of an idler. I won't spoil the rest of the story up to the attack, but the resulting situation will show how coward these terrorists are (we hope none of them were as bold as other terrorists we know are) and how fragile Verloc's family relations are, especially in view of the terribly stupid action he commits.

This is a very dark tale. None of the characters are attractive, but they are exteremely well developed, and that's what counts. The humor used by Conrad is without concessions: for all its cruelty, I found the bombing scene a very funny one. Conrad makes hard fun of all these types who talk and talk about anarchy, the "Revolution", ideology and their supposed love for humanity, a love conspicuously absent from their daily lives.

How pertinent, in these times, to have a great and darkly funny novel to taka a look at, now that the types have, sadly, passed into action.

As a die-hard Conrad fan, I was disappointed by The Secret Agent, which seemed to try too hard to be ironic. Conrad is best in character studies, such as Lord Jim, and this plunge into political satire does not suit him. I love to make fun of socialists and anarchists as much as the next person (since, you know, they believe the same things when their ideologies are contradictory), and Conrad really wants us to feel contempt for the characters. Mostly, however, I felt indifference. There are some witticisms in here, and I enjoyed Stevie, the "slow" brother of Mrs. Verloc. Overall, however, Conrad was best at sea. Everyone should read Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and if you appreciate those, try Chance and Victory. But don't look to this book for an accurate or flattering representation of Conrad.

The beginning of The Secret Agent was a little disappointing to me, but that was mostly because of the style of writing. Although I do not feel this book was as good as Heart of Darkness, Conrad wrote an amazing finish. I felt myself thinking what might have happened, who the bomber may have been. Then when Conrad revealed my thoughts were correct, I felt shaken. Stevie's character had my pity and sympathy, and his end left me saddened. I felt Mrs. Verloc's only recourse would be to kill her husband, yet I was still surprised at her actions. I was almost surprised at how much she picked up from Mr. Verloc when she was in such a derranged state. But what Conrad does best in this novel is portray human emotions. He accurately described how many humans think, and how they react to traumatic situations. The last seventy pages of the novel more than make The Secret Agent worth reading.

In _The Secret Agent_, Conrad takes an incisive look at post-Victorian England.

Even as it emerged from the Industrial Revolution as Mistress of the World - the last and the greatest of the old, geographically-powerful empires, and one on which the sun never set - Conrad reveals the British culture to be at a cross-roads with itself. Morally and ideologically bankrupt, struggling to come to grips with its deep-seated past even as it looked despairingly into the future, this England is a mix of characters straight from a Dickens novel living in a world of drudgery and despair worthy of Kafka.

The story focuses on Verloc, a secret agent who has outlived his time. Included in the narrative, as well, is the circle of naive and outdated visionaries and utopians with whom he comes into contact. The plot follows Verloc's stated task - the planting of a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory, a metaphor relating to the struggle of science versus ideology that cannot be missed. The end result bespeaks not the superiority of science over ideals, or vice versa, so much as it testifies to human weakness and fickleness.

Above all, Conrad has written a psychological novel - a broad narrative that examines human motive and methodology against the backdrop of a city that hangs stubbornly on to the mores of the late Victorian Age. More poignant still, its citizens seek to find the meaning of their existence beyond the impersonal, mechanical demands of their place in society - and failing that, they seek to inject their own meaning and sense of purpose into the world around them. Accordingly, Conrad's analysis of the masks people wear is masterful and gripping.

Seemingly rather pointless as far as plot development is concerned, _The Secret Agent_ was never meant to be a thriller and should not be read as such. Instead, it is a brilliantly ironic and incisive look at human nature and the lengths we will go to to preserve our perceived purpose in life. Read it and you will come away with a new sense of perception not only of yourself and those around you but also of the reality you live in.

- Benjamin Gene Gardner

I must admit to having a love-hate relationship with Conrad. His novels possess an undeniable power, and I have read each of his novels with the utmost fascination. Yet, I can't say that actually reading a Conrad novel is an enjoyable experience. His vision of the world is a tad too bleak, his confidence in human nature way too despairing, and the overall atmosphere way too gloomy for me to derive pleasure from reading Conrad.

Although not set in one of the exotic locales which we associate with Conrad, THE SECRET AGENT is both one of his finest and one of his most typical novel, with one exception. In most of his books, the plot revolves around situations which inevitably lead to tragedy and disaster, but in which a central character is often able to somewhat redeem his life by an act or acts of personal heroism. The feel is usually quite similar to that of Norse mythology, in which Gods and men will struggle at the end of the world against the forces of evil, but will lose. The challenge is to oppose the evil heroically. But in THE SECRET AGENT, the central character is anything but heroic, and is in no truly important way opposed to the powers of evil.

I have to admit to being perplexed by claims that Conrad was a great prose stylist. I will confess that I find that with his prose, the sum is greater than its parts. If you examine his sentences, he is without question, along with Theodore Dreiser, perhaps the worst constructor of sentences in the English language. Perhaps having learned English only after reaching adulthood is to blame. Many of his sentences are grammatically opaque. Frequently his sentences are incomplete or badly constructed. Almost never does Conrad seem to sense the rhythm of the language. Perhaps this lack of rhythm is what many mistake for a great prose style. I have spent a fair amount of time in the secondary literature on Conrad, and so far I have yet to find a single Conrad scholar who felt that he possessed a command of the English language. The consensus seems to be that he is a great writer despite his struggle with the English language, not because of any mastery he possesses over it.

Overall, I hold this to be one of Conrad's most important novels, on a par with UNDER WESTERN EYES, HEART OF DARKNESS, VICTORY, and NOSTROMO.

Ironically, Alfred Hitchcock filmed a version of THE SECRET AGENT, but it was not the movie with the same name. Hitchcock's THE SECRET AGENT was actually based on Maugham's Ashenden stories (which Maugham says were based upon his own experiences as a secret agent; he claims to have been one of the more inept agents in history). Hitchcock's version of the Conrad novel was SABOTAGE. Hitchcock changed many of the details, and his religious beliefs never allowed him to engage in the despair one finds in Conrad (Hitchcock was a devout Catholic). Although his version resembles Conrad, it isn't a very faithful adaptation either in plot or in spirit.

I don't want to in any way be condescending, either to those who will read this review, or to those marvelous writers who have gone before, but I do think modern readers do not always approach older writing in the proper frame of mind. We need to remember that the only mass entertainment they had was novels, and the pace, because that's all there was in those days, is understandably slower. What modern writers would dismiss in a line or two might take a page or more for people like Conrad and Dickens. But, oh my, the places you can go, if you just consent to be seated in one of those old-time carriages!

THE SECRET AGENT is certainly a case in point. Like all Conrad--for my tastes, at least--he was a bit difficult to read in places. Conrad really loaded up a sentence. But when he's on his form, he writes some of the best sentences ever crafted in English Literature.

Other reviewers have given many of the plot points, so I won't repeat them here. Let me just say that I just finished reading the novel last night, and many of those images are still with me--epecially those in the last section of the novel.

It was tough sledding in the beginning. Quite frankly, I found myself wondering why some consider this novel to be one of Conrad's finest, but there were enough of Conrad's marvelous sentences to keep me in the book. Then I got to the part where Winnie learned of her brother Stevie's fate, and Mr. Verloc's role in it, Verloc being Winnie's husband. From then to the end of the book it was a ride in a rocket! Conrad's depiction of Winnie's feelings, culminating in her own ghastly actions, must surely rank among the very finest scenes in literature. It was just astounding, especially when one considers that Conrad wrote at a time when women's thoughts and feelings were considered trivial, if they were thought of at all. But those passages that revolved around Winnie's reaction to Stevie's death could have been written yesterday, in the sense of getting down to how a woman in her place would feel. As for the sentences... well, only the masters wrote at that level, and Joseph Conrad is certainly one of these.

If you're one of those avid readers who takes the time to read reviews like this, read THE SECRET AGENT. You won't be sorry you did.

It is amazing how well this terribly story fits into nowadays reality. Terrorism, with all its hideous irrationality and contradictions is masterly depicted by Conrad. And so is human nature. Every single character is treated here as the center of his/her own universe, which results in wonderful psychological creations. From the very Mr Verloc -the secret agent- to an apparently insignificant cabman, all of them are given here the opportunity of redemption, since they are so humanly feeble. The author reaches this goal by arriving at numerous standstills where action seems to be suspended in the air while characters are sunk in deep reflection -or else are aided by Conrad's voice on account of their difficulties to express themselves.

The whole story is encircled in a gloomy atmosphere that turns to be very difficult to escape from. It starts with Mr Verloc's visit to "the embassy" where he is assigned a mission to "justify" his work as secret agent. Being scornfully treated, he finds himself involved in a plot that leads him to take actions he would have never think of...wouldn't he...? Thus, his initial attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory ends up in a dreadful tragedy whose unspeakable consequences had not been meant by his author.

Although not easy to follow for the non-native reader, which is my case, this appalling and great story is really worthwhile. I am glad I have made the effort.

It is amazing how well this terribly story fits into nowadays reality. Terrorism, with all its hideous irrationality and contradictions is masterly depicted by Conrad. And so is human nature. Every single character is treated here as the center of his/her own universe, which results in wonderful psychological creations. From the very Mr Verloc -the secret agent- to an apparently insignificant cabman, all of them are given here the opportunity of redemption, since they are so humanly feeble. The author reaches this goal by arriving at numerous standstills where action seems to be suspended in the air while characters are sunk in deep reflection -or else are aided by Conrad's voice on account of their difficulties to express themselves.

The whole story is encircled in a gloomy atmosphere that turns to be very difficult to escape from. It starts with Mr Verloc's visit to "the embassy" where he is assigned a mission to "justify" his work as secret agent. Being scornfully treated, he finds himself involved in a plot that leads him to take actions he would have never think of...wouldn't he...? Thus, his initial attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory ends up in a dreadful tragedy whose unspeakable consequences had not been meant by his author.

Although not easy to follow for the non-native reader, which is my case, this appalling and great story is really worthwhile. I am glad I have made the effort.