The Secret Agent Introduction

What kinds of things do you expect from a book called The Secret Agent? Maybe dark, foggy London streets? Mysterious bombings, perhaps? A few anarchists hanging out in porn stores? Some suicide leaps off of ferry boats? Crooked cops?

Well, Joseph Conrad's novel ticks all of these bleak and eerie boxes… and then some.

Published in 1907, The Secret Agent is a story of terrorism, politics, social corruption, and reality TV-caliber family drama. It might be because Conrad is a bit of a Debbie Downer (the understatement of the century) but the novel didn't sell very well during his time: it probably hit too close to home. Since 1950, though, The Secret Agent has risen to classic status, and is now taught in high schools and universities all around the world and holds the spot of #46 on Modern Library's 100 Best Novels… ahead of Conrad's most popular work, Heart of Darkness.

In 1920, Conrad wrote an Author's Foreword to The Secret Agent, in which he reveals that the book's plot is inspired by the "Greenwich Bomb Outrage" of February 1894, which happened when a young anarchist named Martial Bourdin blew himself up in Greenwich Park after a bomb he was carrying exploded in his hands. In his foreword, Conrad refers to this incident 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."

Basically, the Greenwich Bomb Outrage filled even the uber-intelligent (and uber-skeptical) Conrad with questions about the world's capacity for reason and order…and he decided to ponder over the chaotic universe and its nuts-o inhabitants in The Secret Agent.

In this book, the cynical genius of Joseph Conrad pits cartoonishly unlikeable anarchists and left-wing radicals (who talk a big game without ever actually doing anything) against police officers who just love the thrill of their job and consider criminals to be a totally natural—and even necessary—part of society. Hey, no one has ever accused Conrad of telling people what they want to hear.

Conrad lived during a time when many people were talking about how awesome modern society was, while others—like anarchists, Marxists, and left-wing revolutionaries—were shouting that society in general had to be blown up so we could start over and get it right. Frankly, Conrad could never fully get behind either side of this debate, and you can see this in the way he pokes fun at both the police and the anarchists in The Secret Agent.

Among all the spy games and explosions, though, The Secret Agent is, at its heart, a family drama. The book's title character, Mr. Verloc, definitely seems to like his wife Winnie, who in turn seems to think about nothing beyond the safety of her brother, the mentally disabled Stevie. This family drama, though, has the bad luck of playing out in a cruel and often completely insane world.

If there is hope for humanity as a whole in this book, you're going to have to dig for it. The upside is that you'll learn an awful lot about your own beliefs while you're digging… and you'll get to bask in the bone-dry wit and stunning eloquence of Joseph Conrad's literary genius.