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" and ndash; 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' and ndash; at the Greenwich Observatory. But the plan goes horribly wrong and the repercussions are dramatically different from those that Verloc intended.