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    The Secret Agent
    The Secret Agent
    The Secret Agent
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Secret Agent

    Written by Joseph Conrad

    Narrated by David Horovitch

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent is a tale of anarchism, espionage and terrorism. Our agent, a man named Mr Verloc, minds his own business while he keeps his shop in London’s Soho, alongside his wife, who attends to her aged mother and disabled brother. Their lives are turned upside down when Verloc is reluctantly employed to plant a bomb and destroy an observatory in London. What was once the perfect bomb plot inevitably turns awry and Verloc, his family and his associates are forced to face the consequences. Conrad’s later political novel bears all the hallmarks of his captivating style: The Secret Agent brims with melodious and poetic language, alongside crystal- clear psychological insights that could only be the work of a uniquely gifted storyteller.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJun 1, 2014
    ISBN9781843798682
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Polish-born Joseph Conrad is regarded as a highly influential author, and his works are seen as a precursor to modernist literature. His often tragic insight into the human condition in novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent is unrivalled by his contemporaries.

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    Reviews for The Secret Agent

    3.5/5

    1,040 ratings55 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Florence and Edward are newlyweds...this story takes place on their wedding night. Ian McEwan's writing is really good. The final scene between Florence and Edward on Chesil Beach was superb. It wasn't clear which way their relationship would go; what was clear was the difference each word or sentence they spoke to each other made. To me, that one scene made the whole book worthwhile, and turned an otherwise ordinary plot into a masterpiece. As the Economist reviewer said, this story showed "the entire course of a life changed--by doing nothing."
    • 3/5
      Bijwijlen hilarisch verhaal van een groepje anarchisten die in Londen een spraakmakende aanslag willen plegen op het Greenwich Observatorium. Moeilijk boek, niet zozeer om de gewone modernistische aanpak, wel om de verregaande introspectie (zeer traag). Nadruk op het kijken van Verloc naar Stevie, waarbij het maar heel traag tot hem doordringt welk nut de jongen voor hem kan hebben; Winnie kijkt heel anders
    • 1/5
      Rambling. Witless. Had very little to do with espionage.
    • 2/5
      Eh... not so much. I expected much more from the author I've heard such good things about. Maybe I just missed the mark. Right now I'm in the middle of Atonment, though, and am understanding why McEwan is so widely praised.
    • 4/5
      I think Conrad was like Carver (you never thought you'd see that comparison, did you?): he should have stuck with the short form, which in Conrad's case was the novella. I don't think you could call anything Conrad wrote "short". This was a great story stretched out over much too many pages.
    • 4/5
      Reason Read: 1001, TBR/ROOTThis book was written in 1906 by Joseph Conrad. Its themes are terrorism/anarchism, politics.Sounds like today doesn't it? It was set in London in 1886. Anarchism is a unified organization but a collection of ideas on rejection of government and authority. The character Adolf Verloc is a spy living in London. His front is London shopkeeper. The anarchist are Michaelis who spent time in prison and really isn't much danger in any way, Comrade Ossipon, and "The Professor". Although largely ineffectual as terrorists, their actions are known to the police. The group produces anarchist literature. The story explores the lone anarchist, the bomb maker as the extreme form. This type abandons conventional morality and are not constrained by morality or social order. It shows that the ones hurt by political violence are the innocent and another point in the book is that anarchists and the legal authority are two sides of the same coin.
    • 5/5
      Re-reading, and maintains the ability to stun on the 3rd or 4th time through.
    • 4/5
      Just in case you think there's something new under the sun, here's a book published in 1907 about fanatical outcasts in a modern who live in a lonely, dirty modern hellscape that dream of committing random acts of terrible violence. More than a hundred very bloody years later, it's interesting to see how much about the way we think about terrorism hasn't changed: the novel's radicals, who range from gormless idealists to bloodthirsty maniacs, seem like recognizable archetypes that might have been found in any of the last century's underground movements. In a titled lady's fawning over a certain incomprehensible, childlike anarchist, a bit of radical chic here. Throughout the novel, Conrad takes pains to illustrate, in turn, their poverty of spirit and their inevitable hypocrisy. It's all horribly familiar. It's also a bit strange to see Joseph Conrad tell a story that has so little do with boats: the only water here seems to fall, interminably, from the gray London sky. It's also weird to see him, in his formal, finely tuned, way, take a decidedly ironic tone. Awful as they are, this novel's terrorists are mostly walking contradictions: for all their grand ideas, they're pitifully flawed humans, as lazy self-seeking, and comfortably bourgeois as the next guy. Conrad deals with their contradictions expertly, and while there aren't any really funny moments here, there's a lot of black comedy to be had. The book's title might refer to a specific character, but absolutely in the book seems to be living a double life, and most of them are at least dimly aware of it. The book has other strengths, including a wonderfully detailed picture of a dreary, dirty Victorian London that may interest readers of historical fiction, but it's big weakness is its tempo. Sentence-for-sentence, Conrad might have been one of the finest authors English has ever produced, but nobody's ever accused him of taking shortcuts. While most of the book's action takes place on a single day, it seems like forever. One can see why the spy novelists that wrote after "The Secret Agent" chose to tell their stories in lean, hard-edged, colorfully profane prose: the author's verbosity, skillful as it is, drains most of the mystery and the fun out of this story. This criticism may be unfair. While his subject matter might make him an obvious inclusion in any "Boy's Own Stories" compilation, I doubt that Conrad was trying to write genre fiction. While this isn't a particularly readable book, more than a century after it was published, it remains a sharply observed and superbly written study in human weakness, political fanaticism, and basic hypocrisy.
    • 5/5
      My best friend Joel has a friend Bob who teaches at Rutgers. Nearly a decade ago, before becoming a scholarly expert on Borat, he stated that in terms of literature he wasn't going to bother with anything written later than 1920; what was the point, he'd quip? I admired his pluck. While I'm not sure he still ascribes to such. Well, for a couple of weeks in 2004 I adhered to the goal. There have been many goals with a similar history and such a sad conclusion: sigh. This was my first effort towards that goal and what an amazing novel it is.

      The Secret Agent is the dark reversal of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. The devices employed are grim and effective. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Spy thriller that clearly heavily influenced le Carre. I really enjoyed the slow burn into incandescence.
    • 3/5
      The Secret Agent is another Conrad mystery, great for descriptions of locale and depth of characters, but slow and weak with plot.Once again, there was no character whose fate readers might connect to or care about.
    • 4/5
      There may have been a time, long before this book was written, when its darkly comic vision of politics, revolutionaries, and law enforcement didn't apply. But I doubt there has been a time since. No one understood the dark intersection of politics, money, power, and love quite like Joseph Conrad. Since the moment that the man on the street gained enough power to have an opinion, politics (being all local) has wormed its way into every corner of our lives, and Conrad does a wonderful job of examining those motives. Unlike Sinclair or Rand, however, Conrad's style is not distant or didactic. In fact, the lens can often be so close as to slow the pacing. A very timely book, ahead of its time.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book much more than I expected--I had actually never heard of it before finding it on Serial Reader and the 1001 books list.Winnie has spent her life devoted to her mentally disabled brother. She forgoes a true love in order to marry Mr Verloc, who is kind to Stevie and happy to have he (and then her mother) live with them.Winnie is happy enough. She works the store, cares for Stevie, and is satisfied. But then her mother chooses to move into an indigent's home through her late husband's connections--she is worried for Stevie, and feels this move while she is alive is best. But then Winnie learns how her husband truly supports them--it's not the store, he is a secret agent. She has always put up with/enjoyed the gatherings of his revolutionary friends. But now his client is asking too much.
    • 4/5
      To me, this is one of the darkest novels I have read in a long time. It is a tale of a simple man used by the "government" with disastrous results. The simplest are affected the most adversely. Clearly, the author held some significantly negative perceptions of the hierarchies within government, and their manipulations of the little people!
    • 3/5
      At the turn of the 20th century, Adolf Verloc is a London shopkeeper. He has a wife (Winnie), a mother-in-law, and a brother-in-law (Stevie) with some sort of mental disability. Verloc is also a secret agent for a foreign government. He isn't called on to do much – just pass on the occasional bit of information and make contact with new arrivals who come as customers to his shop. This changes when he is called to the Embassy and ordered to execute a bombing attack on Greenwich. The bombing goes wrong, and everything falls apart for Verloc.The plot sounds like it should be an exciting book. It isn't. Most of the book is filled with the thoughts of various characters – Verloc, his fellow anarchists, various police officials, Verloc's wife and her family. Their thoughts are occasionally interrupted by the comments or actions of other characters. This book was surprisingly difficult to follow in audio, even with a talented reader that I would otherwise enjoy listening to. I don't think I would like it any better in print. Hitchcock made a film version of the book, and I think I might like it better.
    • 4/5
      It took a while until I could immerse myself in the story. I liked the quiet style for a strong content. First, the reader is introduced to the secret agent as a bore. Despite the fact that he does not spray out of power, his thoughts and actions are very awake. He has the talent to take the people for himself and things to turn so that he comes out fine. But he has the bill not made with his wife, who does not trust him. Likewise, the members of his association to turn away from him and one of them tried to gain profit for himself.I liked the profound story.
    • 3/5
      “Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious. The Secret Agent was first printed in 1907 and is based on actual events, the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1894. Mr. Verloc, who runs a pornographic shop, is summoned to a foriegn Embassy in London. There he is revealed to be a secret agent. There is a new man at the Embassy and he believes that Mr Verloc is no longer being productive as a spy. The new man, Mr Vladimir, sees himself as a man of action and suggests that Mr. Verloc should set off a bomb in some scientific place to prove his worth and to try and shake Britain's perceived liberal attitude.Mr. Verloc is married to a beautiful, younger woman and lives with her, her mother and her simple minded brother Stevie whom is cared for devotedly by his sister Mrs Verloc. He holds meetings at his shop with fellow anarchists.When a man blows up in Greenwich Park Mr. Verloc is believed to be the victim but it is actually his brother-in-law who has died. The police also are immediately suspicious of Mr. Verloc, and a Chief Inspector Heat visits the shop and informs the unaware Mrs Verloc that her brother has died. She is naturally devastated and blames her husband as well with shocking results.In many respects this is a very simple plot about an attack on a British building concocted by a foreign power and packed with characters that are allegorical in nature, the wily foreigner Mr Vladimir, the meddling policeman Chief Inspector Heat and his ambitious boss, a haughty politician in Sir Ethelred, yet it is one full of powerful emotions. Love, pride and duplicity to name but a few. However, perhaps the most important emotion is conceit or maybe self-worth. Mr Vladimir believes himself a man of action but is obviously rocked when his part in the bomb plot is exposed, Heat believes he knows and can prove who the offender is without bothering to look at the evidence but this idea of inflated self-worth is particularly evident in Mr Verloc. He seems comfortable in his comfy married life but his world is rocked when his value as an informer is questioned and when his part in the bombing is revealed he believes that he is important enough to cause major embarrassment to the respective authorities yet his is but a minor role in a bigger game. This point is nicely illustrated as two of his fellow anarchists are seen walking down the crowded street alone, "one endeavouring to secure himself in the conviction that 'He was a force' with the power to regenerate the world, the other with his self-conception in ruins".So saying all that why did I not give it a higher rating. To be perfectly honest I felt that the author rather over-indulged in the minutia of minor details which stopped rather than enhanced the flow of the story for my taste. That said it is still a worthy read.
    • 4/5
      I read Heart of Darkness back in my school days, but I am pretty sure this is the first Conrad novel I have read. I guess I am a bit disappointed. Conrad built up such a nice configuration, but doesn't then put it to full use. What might Vladimir have done to cover up his own tracks? What if Verloc had turned aside more quickly and then had to figure out how to proceed. The thing is too much of an open and shut morality tale. What makes these things so much more sordid is their lasting character, the cover-ups of the cover-ups. What could Kafka have done with this material. OK, Kafka would go to the other extreme! This is more like a novella. Things just don't developed fully. It is like a snapshot of a world, more than a movie. Still, it is a rich snapshot, and surely in its time and place it opened up a window onto a very unusual world, not often seen in literature. Nowadays, though, it's too common. Still, Conrad is a master. The book is worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Mr. Verloc leads a double life as a spy and a business owner, and lives with his wife Winnie, his mother-in-law and Stevie, a mentally disabled brother of his wife. Immersed in a social circle of anachists, Mr. Verloc is pushed to become involved in a daring plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in London. When things take a brusque turn, the reader begins his/her dark descent into depths of the human mind. It was probably my mistake for choosing this book to start my experience of Conrad’s writing, as he is known for his other works and I am not naturally called to the themes of espionage or politics to begin with. But what’s done is done – I wanted to get ahead on my English literature syllabus so I did what I did. If there is anything you must know, it is that the second half of the book is quite a change (for the better) from the first half. Overall, I found this book to be far too tedious for my taste, with a long-winded prose that failed to present anything spectacular before my eyes, but the novel was saved by Conrad’s expansion of Mrs. Verloc’s character in the second half, as it makes for a fascinating read and provides a fresh new perspective after the sudden plot-twist. I realize that Conrad’s works frequently dabble in the evils of man, but I found that The Secret Agent failed to really make me feel anything about it. His prose is lyrical, but lacks the coherence and power of a unified force – it drawls on and on. Take this sentence for example: “The shattering violence of destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless fragments affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of lightning” (44). I frequently found the voice in the back of my head retorting “so what?” to similar sentences. There is a lot that can be shown with silence or absence, most definitely, but unlike other writers I have read, Conrad fails to flesh out the relevant emotions and truths about our existence (and instead, just vaguely points to their shadow) thereby making his writing (or at least that which is captured in this book) underdeveloped in my book.
    • 1/5
      Like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher. While this is one of the classics, it did not grab me in a couple hours of dedicated listening, so I put it aside. This is the third try, so I give up.
    • 3/5
      A solid book, and a good choice for people who want to read something by Conrad besides Heart of Darkness- not that the works have much in common.

      Conrad paints the world of secret agents as one joined because of financial interests, not ardent belief or nationalism or some other soft motivation. It's a bit cynical, but variety of perspectives is the spice of life. Governments here treat their agents as salaried employees expected to produce results, while the agents see the governments that pay them as witless bureaucrats who should stay silent and just keep forking over the money.

      The most interesting part of this book is the structure. You can piece together what has happened rather early in the book, and through the point of view of a detective character this suspicion is confirmed. The tension is created by waiting for the character who will take the news the worst to learn of it. Tension is ratcheted up by hinting at just how bad that character is going to take the news. Then there's a payoff that doesn't disappoint, even if it could have been arrived at faster without doing any harm to the narrative.

      The final section has some beautiful writing, with vivid descriptions of London. I was irritated that some threads, particularly that of the detective character, were left dangling. If The Secret Agent had been tighter and all the stories tied up this would have been a four star book, as it stands it's somewhere above three stars but not all the way there.
    • 4/5
      An enticing read filled with grotesque and somewhat comical figures. Conrad definitely understood politics and this is a well-written, bitingly satiric look at both sides of a major issue during his day. You need to understand, or at least quickly skim, the historical context if you are not going to become lost while reading. Anarchy was quite a confusing movement which was being embraced by many in the working class. Conrad definitely feels no pity for anarchists, but he doesn't spare the government or police from the bite of his pen, either. I really enjoyed the philosophical bits in which he deconstructed the very ideas of anarchy and criminality. One can see why the book would have been highly controversial at the time. An unsettling feature of the book is that contemporary readers can see how manufactured terrorist events and governmental squabbling have not changed much in the past century. Certain newspaper headlines might seem familiar to readers who keep up with current events. I do have a few issues with the novel from a disability studies perspective, namely that Stevie is an archetypal character sent into this fictional world to teach all of the able people a lesson, but hey... I did find myself laughing quite a few times throughout; how can you not find Ossipon and the rest of the gang hilarious? Certainly worth the read.
    • 4/5
      I think Conrad was like Carver (you never thought you'd see that comparison, did you?): he should have stuck with the short form, which in Conrad's case was the novella. I don't think you could call anything Conrad wrote "short". This was a great story stretched out over much too many pages.
    • 3/5
      Not bad - not memorable. Considered by some as Conrad's best. If you want his best, read Nostromo.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing. About anarchist terrorists in London around the end of the 19th century, but one hears little concrete of either anarchism or terrorism, only about the not too interesting characters. One of the characters is supposed to have been an inspiration for the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. The modernity of it surprised me. Conrad had a good grasp of human nature. His rich prose brings late 19th century London to life, and the intrigues of the life of a secret agent are as well drawn as anything written by John Le Carré almost 100 years later.
    • 5/5
      A few years ago I began a personal tradition of starting each year's reading with a reread of a Joseph Conrad novel. This year it was The Secret Agent, a book I did a massive amount of research about during my grad school days. The book, set in London in late 19/early 20th century, tells the story of Adolph Verloc, who is too indolent to work and so makes his living in the employ of an Eastern European embassy, spying on London's anarchists. When Verloc's employer puts pressure on him to create an anarchist outrage so that a too tolerant English society will decide to crack down on the anarchists in their midst, Verloc's troubles begin. We also follow at times the anarchists themselves and the police. But this is really only the framework for a broader portrayal of the ways in which Conrad saw the growing industrialization and impersonality of society as a destroyer of hope, incentive and emotion and as a promoter of alienation and despair. At the center of these themes are Verloc's home life, and especially the ways in which his wife has married him as a form of personal compromise, away from happiness but for security for herself, her indigent mother and her mentally challenged brother. But Conrad's themes are equally evident in his descriptions of the city itself, its filth, slime and darkness. Also, very unusual for its time was Conrad's bending of time, showing us important episodes out of chronological order in ways that make us feel that time itself is standing still.Conrad had nothing but contempt for anarchists, and to a lesser degree for politics as a whole. He saw anarchists as parasites, people looking to tear down, but not to contribute to the daily business of getting along and getting on with life. Conrad, after all, came of age on merchant ships, a world where each man depended for his life on the other fellow doing his job all the time, and where even the most menial task could be crucial. But that level of contempt is the book's flaw, as Conrad let his antipathy run away with him, here. Consequently, the anarchists come off as mere caricatures, and the narrative loses power when they take center stage. As always, though, I am in love with Conrad's turn of a phrase and with his powers of observation.
    • 5/5
      Despite its name, this is not a James Bond type story. First of all, it is set in 1880s London and involves a small group of mostly ineffectual anarchists. Secondly, the primary characteristic of the main "secret agent" is laziness! Conrad gives us wonderful portraits of these disaffected men, each of whom is disgruntled for different reasons, as well as the rest of the Verloc family.

      As I was reading this, I kept having the sensation of deja vu. I knew that I had never read this before, but certain aspects were extremely familiar to me and in one important part I knew in advance what was coming. Finally I realized that Alfred Hitchcock had based one of his early movies - Sabotage - on this book! I am a big fan of Hitchcock (and have seen Sabotage more than once), but although his movie is quite exciting (even more thrills than the book), it doesn't capture Conrad's characters and has a completely different (and more conventional) ending. The book features complex characters and motivations which are perhaps slower and less exciting but will stay with me longer.
    • 3/5
      I wish I had read this in the early years after 9/11. While the characters in Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" are not superficially the same as the characters that would figure into the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent events, the themes are eerily similar.

      As a piece of literature, though the book is an almost surreal set of disjointed pieces. Each chapter is a different view, through a different set of eyes, and only by looking at them all in turn does the mystery unfold. Methodically, Conrad unfolds each participants thoughts in slow motion, and while he demonstrates a command of the English language that is enviable, as well as a vocabulary that would be substantial for a native speaker and even more so for a sailor whose native tongue was Polish, the slow pace demands a serious reader's attention and patience. You get a full picture in the reading, but you look at every details that unfolds.

      And yet, plodding as the pace is, there are surprises. After pages of slow, deliberate character development, a sudden jolt of action with shift the plot, especially as the personal consequences of the underlying act of terror begins to turn the characters in on each other. In this regard, one sees echoes of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or even Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" in the inescapable maelstrom that drags down all who are touched by violent men and violent actions.

      Is it heavy, then? Undeniably. Worth the effort? Without question, it is an interesting and fascinating read, and Conrad's prescience, decades before the onset of the terrorism's "golden age," is itself an argument for reading "The Secret Agent."

      Just don't pick it up expecting James Bond. He's not here.
    • 3/5
      A pretty cool Conrad story, and refreshing in that it's not about some guy on a boat.