3 Review(s)

"The Secret Agent is one of Conrad's two supreme masterpieces, one of the two questionable classics of the first order that he added to the English novel, and in its own way, it is like Nostromo in the subtle and triumphant complexity of its art" – F.R. Leavis. An actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 is taken by Conrad as the basis of the central action in the novel. Verloc, who is secretly working for the police and a foreign power' (Russia) while ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho, is required by his masters to discredit the anarchist group in some spectacular way. He persuades his wife's simpleton brother, Stevie, to plant a bomb - provided by the novel's most terrifying figure, 'The Professor'– at the Greenwich Observatory. But the plan goes horribly wrong and the repercussions are dramatically different from those that Verloc intended. The novel grotesquely mirrors the world of law and order, fatuous civil servants and corrupt policemen in a squalid terrorist landscape. Repulsive characters and amoral caricatures collaborate to form a black satire on English society, a satire sharpened into focus with a portrait of family life.