THE SECRET AGENT: A SIMPLE TALE

The Secret Agent is the most tautly plotted and elegantly stylized of Conrad’s political novels. Highly ironic, strongly satiric, sombre yet tinged with black comedy or savage farce, this study of anarchists and conspirators in Victorian London is an important intermediary text: intermediary between the urban fictions of Charles Dickens and those of Graham Greene, between vivid grotesquerie and seedy corruption. A remarkable characterisation is the impersonal narrator: urbane, drily ironic or sardonic, inspecting human vice and folly with the amused contempt of a disenchanted connoisseur. Superbly crafted, technically assured, The Secret Agent remains bleak in its cumulative emphasis on destruction and futility.

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