  Buy another edition!, 2009-01-05
Wanting to re-read this modern classic after some decades, in the course of a second visit to Conrad's writing, I made the mistake to buy this Signet edition.
Don't do that! It sucks. The print is compact and the letters too small. It has no explanatory notes, which would be important for this kind of book. It is a punishment to read this.
Stay away from this edition and buy the Oxford World Classics pocket book instead.
I will review that shortly.
A Good Spy Story, But Not Prophecy, 2008-12-20
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.
Stevie, 2008-12-14
In this novel the bombing of the Greenwich Observatory is the event around which story and characters revolve with the exactitude of circles scribed on paper. The Observatory bombers are not anarchists. The culprits are an agent provocateur who has infiltrated the anarchists' ranks and his half-witted brother-in-law. The mastermind of the plot isn't an anarchist either. He's a Russian diplomat frustrated with the refusal of the London police to arrest the anarchists. In short, a goverment sponsors an act of terrorism in order to provoke a crackdown on terrorists.
The idea Conrad sets out to blow up in the novel is modernism's sin of thinking abstractly about moral and human affairs--abstractly, scientifically, impersonally, and instrumentally. The anarchists think this way; the police do, too; and so do the government officials. Conrad dismisses them all. One person who does not think this way is the secret agent's brother in law Stevie who seems to be the pauper version of Dostoevsky's Idiot Prince Myshkin.
"Mr. Verloc, getting off the sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened the door leading into the kitchen to get more air, and thus disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal table, drawing circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos"
In a scene straight out of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky Stevie refuses to ride in a cab because of the horse being whipped to pull them. When the Cabman explains that he is trying to feed his poor children the empathetic compassion in Stevie's heart explodes like a bomb within him engendering feeling for the horse, cabman, and his children. He verbalizes his feelings telling us "Bad world for poor people". Verloc, the secret agent, manipulates Stevie's compassion to involve him in his terror scheme which results in disaster. The prose in this novel is some of the finest I have had the pleasure to read. In the future whenever I am about to be less than compassionate I hope to remember Stevie.
100 Years of Relevance , 2008-11-14
After 100 years, Conrad's distinctive novel of espionage and counter-espionage is still the apex of the genre, the indispensable masterpiece. It's bleak, mordant, suspenseful, and funny, and it's wildly under-appreciated judging by the other reviews here on amazon.
This is so perfect a spy novel that frankly no other spy novel needed ever to be written. Conrad has said it all. It's tightly plotted, completely plausible except perhaps for a few too-convenient chance meetings on the street, and profoundly insightful into the "politics" of terror. And it's freshly pertinent, even to the point of including an inadvertent suicide bomber.
There are no "good guys," it's true, and nobody on any side of things with indomitable physical or mental abilities. Every single personage is picturesquely grotesque. Every character considers himself cleverly invulnerable yet reveals himself to be irremediably foolish. The descriptions of these moral clowns and the deplorable world of mucky squalor and gilded corruption in which they move are the best writing, sentence by sentence, that Conrad ever did -- worthy of Dickens or Dostoyevsky. There's a sardonic, scornful humor in every scene, however grizzly. This is the darkest picture of human nature I've ever read. Even love and loyalty are degenerative psychoses. One expects a certain fatalistic pessimism from Conrad, sprawling across an ungainly plot, with complicated narrative overlays and ambiguous judgments. The Secret Agent is utterly different; it's as terse and unified as its subtitle claims; it's "a Simple Tale."
"Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law."
That's the first paragraph; if you don't already feel in the presence of a master of subtle indirection just from that much, perhaps you'll be as unresponsive to this great novel as the hapless fools would be who populate its pages.
Hitchcock made a film of it in the 1930s. I've never seen the film, but I can imagine that Hitchcock would have read the novel with sardonic glee and captured its humor. It's Hitchcock in prosody.
Yo! Peeps, if I tell it's totally NOIR, will you give it a ride?
Suspenseful & ironic: A Conrad classic, 2007-10-12
Based on a true incident, Conrad tells the story of Verloc, the secret agent provocateur who is given the task of blowing up the Royal Observatory in London as a way of heaping scorn on anarchists in England. He sends his mentally deficient brother-in-law Stevie with the bomb, which blows up before he can reach the observatory. Stevie is annihilated and when Verloc's wife (Winnie) finds out what happens to her brother, she stabs Verloc with a carving knife.
Conrad insisted his novel was not a political work dealing with anarchy but was only a "work of the imagination." But he captured the seediness and moral deficiencies of everyone involved, from Verloc to Chief Inspector Heat. The last chapter, where Verloc's now-widow is duped by anarchist Tom Ossipon, who steals all her money, is rank with irony. The best chapter, though, the one around which the high reputation of the book revolves, is chapter 11: from its "She [Winnie] knows everything now" to Verloc's stabbing at the end, it ranks as one of Conrad's most suspenseful and dramatic chapters in all his books. [Alfred Hitchcock made use of the incidents in this work for his movie "Sabotage," though Hitch changed the ending and moved the time of the story up to the 1930s.]
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