Secret Agent

Rating:
Summary: Dark humor and a bleak prescience
Review: For all the talk of the supposed "difficulty" of this novel, I found it to be one of the best construed and told that I have read lately. It goes well beyond a simple thriller or spy novel; it is an intense human drama in which the characters have real personalities. Verloc is a loser. He has been living, for the last eleven or so years, off the payments of a foreign embassy which employs him to spy and report on the activities of a terrorist cell, also composed of frustrated, useless, all-talk-no-action losers. Other reviewers have aptly described these characters.

Verloc lives also off the meager profits of a news store, which serves as cover up for his clandestine activities, ignored even by his family. This consists of his younger wife, Winny, her mother and her retarded brother Stevie, a sympathetic but hopeless young man.

As the novel opens, Verloc is in deep trouble. The new officers at the embassy are displeased at the results Verloc's work has achieved, and so one of them brutally warns him that the pay will stop if he doesn't produce at least one major act of terrorism, say, blow up the Greenwich observatory, an icon of modern faith in science. Verloc gets obviously dismayed at this order, for he is no terrorist at all, just a scumbag of an idler. I won't spoil the rest of the story up to the attack, but the resulting situation will show how coward these terrorists are (we hope none of them were as bold as other terrorists we know are) and how fragile Verloc's family relations are, especially in view of the terribly stupid action he commits.

This is a very dark tale. None of the characters are attractive, but they are exteremely well developed, and that's what counts. The humor used by Conrad is without concessions: for all its cruelty, I found the bombing scene a very funny one. Conrad makes hard fun of all these types who talk and talk about anarchy, the "Revolution", ideology and their supposed love for humanity, a love conspicuously absent from their daily lives.

How pertinent, in these times, to have a great and darkly funny novel to taka a look at, now that the types have, sadly, passed into action.

Rating:
Summary: Crime and Punishment
Review: It is amazing how well this terribly story fits into nowadays reality. Terrorism, with all its hideous irrationality and contradictions is masterly depicted by Conrad. And so is human nature. Every single character is treated here as the center of his/her own universe, which results in wonderful psychological creations. From the very Mr Verloc -the secret agent- to an apparently insignificant cabman, all of them are given here the opportunity of redemption, since they are so humanly feeble. The author reaches this goal by arriving at numerous standstills where action seems to be suspended in the air while characters are sunk in deep reflection -or else are aided by Conrad's voice on account of their difficulties to express themselves.

The whole story is encircled in a gloomy atmosphere that turns to be very difficult to escape from. It starts with Mr Verloc's visit to "the embassy" where he is assigned a mission to "justify" his work as secret agent. Being scornfully treated, he finds himself involved in a plot that leads him to take actions he would have never think of...wouldn't he...? Thus, his initial attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory ends up in a dreadful tragedy whose unspeakable consequences had not been meant by his author.

Although not easy to follow for the non-native reader, which is my case, this appalling and great story is really worthwhile. I am glad I have made the effort.

Rating:
Summary: Best enjoyed if you keep focussed while reading it.
Review: This novel is truly both what Conrad subtitles "A Simple Story," and quite a hard nut to crack. Not having read any of Conrad's other, more famous works, I have nothing to compare The Secret Agent to, but I would say that it proved in my own mind that the man is a master of revealing human emotions and motivations. There isn't a single character, however insignifigant they may seem to the story itself, who is not fully developed, from the Assistant Commissioner of Police to Toodles the Secretary to Winnie Verloc, to the intensly creepy "Professor." Nor was this merely description tacked onto the plot; indeed, it took precendence over the plot and became my purpose for continuing to read the book. For the story is simple, and not overly meaninglful.
I will say that Conrad's prose occasionally slowed me down. Once into the middle of a chapter or a conversation I had no problems, but the beginning of each chapter, especially the early ones, was extremely confusing, and had to be suffered through before the books strengths were revealed.