Rating: 
Summary: entertaining and absorbing on multiple levels--NOT difficult
Review: This novel can be read as a psychological character study, as a political critique, or as a thriller. Each way it is thoroughly satisfying. Although it was written in 1904, its political premise closely parallels the situation the United States has been in since September 11, 2001. The ethically dubious "anti-terrorist" tactics of the foreign embassy that protagonist Verloc works for are essentially the "anti-terrorist" tactics of a certain 21st-century un-elected American president.This novel has twice been adapted into film, by the bye. There is a bowdlerized, squeamish, and ineffectual 1937 Alfred Hitchcock version, and there is a faithful and brilliant 1996 version starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette, Gerard Depardieu, and Robin Williams with music by Philip Glass. Re: "If you examine his sentences, he [Joseph Conrad] is without question, along with Theodore Dreiser, perhaps the worst constructor of sentences in the English language." Presumably, the author of this remark is not familiar with the works of pulp science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, for example, and has perhaps read no other newspaper but the New York Times for the past decade. In any case, I found "The Secret Agent" particularly well written, evocative, and easy to read. There were only three sentences in the entire novel that struck me as awkward, confusing, or unidiomatic. The one I remember is a line of dialogue: "Have you been waiting long here?" A 21st-century American would say, "Have you been waiting here long?". Possibly I've caught Conrad thinking in his native Polish here (or in his here native Polish), but for aught I know a Englishman in 1904 would have put it as Conrad has his character put it. In any case, the solecism, if solecism it be, is easily forgiven.
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.
| 
