Rating: 
Summary: Not for everyone
Review: I have read most of the previous reviews and, as always, they are generally wide-ranging. This often occurs with authors whose style requires a concerted effort to follow, and Conrad certainly fills that bill here. He is a brilliant writer, but anyone used to Grisham et al. will likely not find this an enjoyable read.I did not mind re-reading a paragraph here and there to make sure I had the gist of the passage. I greatly admired the depth and fullness of his characters, and his messages were clear and well-received. My only problem was that the plot line (which when written may have had a shocking impact) is diminished significantly in our era of nearly everyday terrorism. That is no fault of Conrad's to be sure, but timelessness is one of the marks of truly great literature. It is an element obviously missing in this case.
Rating: 
Summary: great stylist
Review: Conrad has an absolutely marvelous prose style (although sometimes dense) and his narrative skills are of the highest order. Technically this novel is brilliant; not a single line in it is muddled. Every character was sharply crafted and London has never been more vividly described. I have often heard Hemingway labeled as the century's first great prose stylist, but how could anyone forget Conrad? The only flaw with this book to me was the overuse of foreshadowing; too much was given away too early in the story only to be revealed much later when the reader's patience may have already been exhausted and leading to a winded effect; but the flaws are inconsequential considering Conrad's accomplishment. Many reviewers here claim this book was boring but I think they only need read Conrad's prose slowly, savor and visualize it, and realize it is one of the great works of the twentieth century.
Rating:
Summary: Stick with the Sea Narratives
Review: I've always been a fan of Conrad. I loved _Typhoon_, _The Heart of Darkness_, _Nostromo_, and _The Secret Sharer_. However, I couldn't get into this one as much. There are some nice passages. His descriptions are lucid and not terribly overdone. But the dialogue and incidents of _The Secret Agent_ are so dated that they are no longer suspenseful. The characters have a sort of proto-James Bond quirkiness about them. There are carriage drivers with iron hooks for hands, scruffy communist firebrands, oleaginous embassy gentlemen, and even a psychotic "professor" who wears enough explosives to wipe out a city block and carries a bell-shaped rubber detonator in his overcoat. The domestic scenes with Mr and Mrs Verloc and Stephie are well done, although the inner dialogue becomes wearisome. The overall plot is tedious, and gets somewhat melodramatic near the end. It's not one of Conrad's best. But then, when he wrote the story the political espionage thriller was a relatively new genre. I think he's rightfully recognized as the predecessor of LeCarre and Flemming.
Rating:
Summary: The Jungles of London?
Review: This one is new for me, as I've been an avid reader only of Conrad's sea-related novels. Here, Conrad shifts the scene to London, where he can make a walk to the corner seem like an excursion into another "blank spot on the map." I could not get the image of vines and jungles out of my head (even though we are in the slums of London), though the imagery, including the fog, slime, and mud, all add up to powerful effect, at times- at other times, it seems "too much". I read this novel right after Henry James's "Princess Casamassima," as both deal with the subject matter of terrorism. I preferred this novel, because Conrad seems to understand the shadowy underworld better than James. Yet, (though this may be Conrad's purpose) I never really cared about the characters that much. Mrs. Verloc was the most interesting, but at times her thoughts, rendered in Conrad's extensive interior monologue, often border on stereotype. All in all, a solid effort, but I'll be returning to the sea with Conrad before I visit London with him again.
Rating:
Summary: Inventive espionage thriller from the 1900s
Review: The major event of the plot is an anarchist conspiracy to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. An "agent provocateur", Verloc, is the man caught in the middle, a pawn in a game played by a high-ranking Russian diplomat, a leading police inspector and, on the other side, the sometimes clumsy and ineffectual anarchists. One example of the characterisation immediately sticks in the mind of the reader, long after completing the novel. It is the character of the mysterious Professor, a misanthrope and angel of destruction, who supplies Verloc with the explosives needed to carry out the plot and who embodies nihilism at its most extreme. Joseph Conrad is known for his dense and sometimes contorted prose, and the style of "The Secret Agent" is no exception. Though no great storyteller, he nevertheless demonstrates that he is a psychologist of the first order, in his searching analyses of character and motive. The novel is partly a domestic tragedy, a highly innovative and experimental early Modernist work, a darkly humorous tale with lashings of "schadenfreude" and an esponage thriller that anticipates, in many ways, the best and most recent examples of the genre.
Rating: 
Summary: impact has been dulled
Review: Based on an actual plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, this is one of the first novels to deal with terrorism. A hapless group of anarchists is prodded into the bombing, which destroys them, rather than their intended target. Conrad has created a memorable cast of characters & deftly demonstrates the senseless nature of political violence. But this is a novel whose impact has been dulled by the events of our bloody century. Where once the bombing of Greenwich Observatory would have been a shocking crime, after the assassination attempts on Prime Ministers and other IRA attacks, it seems almost comical. GRADE: B
Rating:
Summary: Cast a cold eye
Review: In this masterpiece Conrad has engendered an entirely new genre. True, it has some affinities with Wilkie Collins, Dostoevsky, even with James's "Princes Casamassima". But Conrad's famous "irony" (better, cynicism masking nihilist despair), a mordant eating out his "characters" (too strong a word for pre-Kafkan zombies-even Professor is an example of one-dimensional pathetic fanatic with zero potentiality for inner freedom) has given birth to Greene, LeCarre, Koestler and numerous lower-rank authors trekking the "Conradland" of shadowy terrorists, failed assassinations, betrayed spies and hidden manipulators. In my opinion, one trait is especially pungent in this work: the absence of humanity. From cover to cover, the novel is saturated with disgust: disgust towards fat people (Mr & Mrs Verloc (the latter being a cruel joke on Conrad's own wife, Jessie)), stupid anarchists, pompous bureaucrats, "efficient" but servile inspectors. "The Secret Agent" is incredibly modern, penetrating (despite, or because of "impenetrable mystery"-see what this phrase stands for), detached and....icily cold.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books of the 20th century
Review: Rarely does a book build on itself as well as Secret Agent. The book starts modestly, but builds in structure, language and plot to a dramatic and heart rending climax. A gem.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit pants really
Review: Most Victorian novels seem to maintain a certain charm, even if they do not retain any real relevence to today's society. This book, written with the intention of shocking early 20th century Britain, has no charm whatsoever. It does not make up for it in relevence either. In fact I do not believe this story has ever held any relevence to anyone, anywhere. It is a short, clumsy attempt of a story about anarchists and their attempts to upset the establishment. The bomb attack goes wrong and everyone thinks twice about the use of force. Nothing else really happens. It is simply terrible. Thank God it is little more than a short story.
Rating:
Summary: For Lovers of Characterisation, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky
Review: The Secret Agent will appeal to anyone who likes Dickens' satire of Victorian society and its members, and to those who like the revolutionaries scattered throughout the works of Dostoyevsky. Only that Conrad is far more biting in his portrait of Victorian England than Dickens ever was, and even his characterisation is comparable if not superior at points. No one could ever forget, for example, Sir Ethelred, who 'opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which the hooked nose seemed anxious to peer'. But Conrad's revolutionaries do not quite topple those of Dostoyevsky (an obvious influence on Conrad despite Conrad's apparent dislike of the Russian). The novel is (thus) primarily character driven; the central idea of the story (the bombing attempt) is so amazingly simple that one almost misses it. The prose is dense and I would not recommend it either as light reading or to Samuel Johnson's 'common reader'.
|
