The Secret Agent

'Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town...a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.' Conrad's 'monstrous town' is London, and his story of espionage and counter-espionage, anarchists and embassies, is a detective story that becomes the story of Winnie Verloc's tenacity in maintaining her devotion to her peculiar and simple-minded brother, Stevie, as they pursue their very ordinary lives above a rather dubious shop in the back streets of Soho. However, far from offering any sentimental picture, The Secret Agent is Conrad's funniest novel. Its savagely witty picture of human absurdity and misunderstanding is written in an ironic style that provokes laughter and unease at the same time, and that continues to provide one of the most disturbing visions of aspiration and futility in twentieth century literature. With an Introduction and Notes by Hugh Epstein, Secretary of the Joseph Conrad Society of Great Britain. .

Inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1894--often called the first modern terrorist act--this chillingly prophetic novel is the literary precursor to the espionage thrillers of such writers as Graham Greene and John le Carre. The Secret Agent offers a devastating portrait of late nineteenth-century London, with its fatuous civil servants, amoral politicians and corrupt police, who are mirrored by their counterparts in the criminal underworld. The secret agent of the title is Verloc, a pornographer who has agreed to go undercover as a mole in an anarchist collective. When his handler instructs him to provoke the group into committing an act of violence, in order to mobilize public opinion for a crack-down, his own family ends up destroyed. .