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The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Everyman's Library Classics)

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This dark comedy about a botched bombing attempt is a nice read. Conrad spends a long time describing an extremely dysfunctional family, only to destroy it all. The degenerate Stevie is a funny character in a cynical way. My disbelief at the bizarre lives of the characters was replaced with disgust when I realized they were/are a reflection of our society's values. It blows my mind that Conrad is not a native speaker of English.

Though the book is classified as being violent and Nihilistic, Dostoevsky fans are surely going to enjoy (or belittle) one particular passage: much reminiscent of Raskolnikov's dream in Crime and Punishment, Stevie, and "idiot" boy, proclaims "Bad bad!" in reference to how a man treats his emaciated horse. The only voice of humanity is that of a intellectually crippled boy. Not an easy book; but short and full of challenging philosophical concepts (HG Wells, Nietzsche)placed in a despairing but interesting light. Additionally, sort of topical insofar as the unibomber was supposedly inspired by the book.

Although this book illustrated the anarchist web surrounding late 19th century London in a very lucid manner, the book had a somewhat asinine and complex plot.

A forerunner of the modern-day mystery novel, The Secret Agent is an important book and also a truly suspenseful story. Verloc is exceptionally well characterized, and Conrad's attempts to politicize a relatively unimportant event (the attempted bombing of the Greenwich observatory by a little-known anarchist) succeed exceedingly well. A good rainy-day book.

For the most part, I think the "classics" are held in high regard for good reason. However, I must disagree with those reviewers who seem to think that anyone who found this book unsatisfying must be a dullard who is too used to watching TV to enjoy a well-written, subtle book.

As a 40-year-old who considers himself fairly well-read and enjoys everything from Dickens to Shakespeare to Ayn Rand, I think I am completely within my rights to classify "The Secret Agent" as boring. The plot is NOT complex as some have written and I enjoy nothing more than long, well-written descriptions. In fact, I thought Conrad did a beautiful job of describing London and the people who inhabited it. But the fact remains that very little happens in this book and a great deal of it you can see coming from a mile away (perhaps due to Conrad's fine use of foreshadow). Owing to the theme of isolation and lack of communication betweens the denizens of "modern society" there is very little dialogue. Conrad uses heavy irony and sarcasm when describing the thoughts of certain characters, especially Mr. Verloc. However, I wouldn't call this "funny" and I didn't see as much "humor" in the book as some other reviewers found.

When Conrad comes to the thoughts and sayings of the real anarchists in the book, it reminded me a little of Sinclair's "The Jungle", which was a great book and story, marred by the socialist diatribe that covers the last 50 pages or so. Reading these (thankfully) brief conversations between the Professor and Ossipon, I felt as bored as when reading some political tract.

There are very few sympathetic characters in the book. So many are obese, as though they are insulated (isolated) from others by their layers of fat. Others are grotesque (the cab driver, Karl Yundt). But the fact that they are unsympathetic or unappealing is not the problem with the book. To me, they were uninteresting.

It all boils down to what I say about some forms of music: I find Reggae boring, because it all sounds kind of the same to me; but I love Blues. Well, a lot of the Blues may sound the same, but it so happens that I like the sound. Maybe I just don't like the way Conrad writes. With a nod to the other reviewers who think that the MTV generation isn't capable of liking this book, I know I would have found it even more boring had I read it in high school

The Secret Agent will appeal to anyone who likes Dickens' satire of Victorian society and its members, and to those who like the revolutionaries scattered throughout the works of Dostoyevsky. Only that Conrad is far more biting in his portrait of Victorian England than Dickens ever was, and even his characterisation is comparable if not superior at points. No one could ever forget, for example, Sir Ethelred, who 'opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which the hooked nose seemed anxious to peer'. But Conrad's revolutionaries do not quite topple those of Dostoyevsky (an obvious influence on Conrad despite Conrad's apparent dislike of the Russian). The novel is (thus) primarily character driven; the central idea of the story (the bombing attempt) is so amazingly simple that one almost misses it. The prose is dense and I would not recommend it either as light reading or to Samuel Johnson's 'common reader'.

This is an excellent introduction to Conrad - a bit confusing and dense in places, but not nearly as much so as his better-known Heart of Darkness, and with a situation that most people can more easily fathom. The diversity of characterization and the clash of various fanatical ideals makes for a good storyline.

That being said, it is a pity that the publishers of this edition decided to include an essay, bound at the front of the book, that totally gives away the only 'plot twist' worthy of the name in the entire story. This 'foreward' should have been placed after the text. Buy this book, but in a different edition.