Book Review: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad (1907)

The paperback cover of the 1983 Signet Classics edition of The Secret Agent that I read. (The Secret Agent was originally published in 1907.)

Polish/British author Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924. He's probably thinking, "And how many classic novels have you written in your third language?"

Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent is a classic work of political intrigue. As the novel begins, it focuses on the hapless Adolf Verloc, a British citizen living in London who is actually a secret agent for an unnamed foreign government—most likely Russia. Verloc owns a shop that sells dirty books, and has a wife, Winnie, who is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. Verloc also supports Winnie’s mother and her younger brother, Stevie, who we would probably diagnose today as having some sort of learning disability. Verloc has contacts among London’s anarchists, and he informs on them to the government he works for. Verloc is called to the Embassy, where Mr. Vladimir, a new administrator, excoriates Verloc for his incompetence. Vladimir tells Verloc that he needs to prod his anarchist friends to carry out an attack, so that the British government will then crack down on civil liberties. Vladimir’s idea for a target is science, and what better scientific target than the Greenwich Observatory? Yes, the Prime Meridian! Greenwich Mean Time! The very house of the great god of science itself!

I’ll leave the plot summary there, so as not to spoil anything. The Secret Agent is a complicated book, with a narrative point of view that shifts as we enter numerous characters’ heads for a period of time. While the novel is told in the third person, there’s part of a paragraph at the beginning of Chapter Two that is in first person. It’s the only time the first person narrator intrudes, so it’s an odd little moment. 

Conrad’s writing is sharp and precise, as he delineates many characters, and their various ways of thinking. Conrad is able to get inside the heads of characters like the Professor, a radical anarchist who walks around with a bomb in his coat, ready to push the button if he’s ever cornered by the cops, and Chief Inspector Heat, who has nothing but contempt for the anarchists. 

Along the way, Conrad has many excellent quotes: “The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.” (p.76)

Another of my favorite quotes was this: “But Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise—at least not truly so. True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position.” (p.79) 

A piece of terse wisdom from Conrad emerges as he describes the Assistant Commissioner of police and his relentless drive to investigate: “We can never cease to be ourselves.” (p.102)

Joseph Conrad had a very interesting backstory, to put it mildly. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, in what is now the Ukraine. English was his third language, after Polish and French, and he didn’t start to learn English until he joined the British merchant marine in his twenties. Pretty impressive, as he is now considered one of the greatest novelists of the English language. After a 19-year marine career, Conrad published his first novel Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River in 1895, when he was thirty-seven years old. Conrad devoted himself to writing for the rest of his life, and he produced a substantial body of work that has proven to be highly influential, including the novella Heart of Darkness, and the novels Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes, among others. 

The Secret Agent is an excellent book, and quite a haunting one. Some of the events in the book were inspired by the 1894 death of Martial Bourdin, a French anarchist who accidentally blew himself up in Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory. It’s unknown what Bourdin’s ultimate goal was, but it may have been an attack on the Observatory. In a 1920 “Author’s Note,” to The Secret Agent, Conrad wrote of Bourdin’s actions as “a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes.” The Secret Agent is Joseph Conrad’s attempt to explain the logical processes of this kind of perverse unreason.