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The Secret Agent (Oxford World's Classics)
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
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Our Price: $8.76
You Save: $ 2.19 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Average Customer Rating:
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The Secret Agent (Oxford World's Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780192801692
ISBN: 0192801694
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2004-04-29
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780192801692
ISBN: 0192801694
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2004-04-29
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
Editorial Review of The Secret Agent (Oxford World's Classics)
Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be
"a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.
Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town," a place of idiocy, madness,
criminality, and butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques.
"a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.
Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town," a place of idiocy, madness,
criminality, and butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques.
Customer Reviews of The Secret Agent (Oxford World's Classics)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Secret Agency
Review: Conrad still suffers today from the same pigeon-hole that his writing was pounded into during his own lifetime. He is still seen as harbinger of distant seas, of the exotic, the foreign. He is best known for Heart of Darkness, a book immortalized in pop culture by Francis Ford Coppola's retelling of this long, tormented short story as a Vietnam epic in Apocalypse Now.
And yet, The Secret Agent is a book that rivals, if not matches or exceeds, that great horror of the English cannon. This is more than a novel about terrorism, this is a terrorist novel. It's a book about poverty and squalor, about the obfuscated struggles of humanity; it conspires to build our ideals into violent extremes, chipping at a suffering domesticity negotiated in silence, then lets them fall in the babble of gutted secrets. This violence is not thrusted upon us in a language that dazzles tired eyes with surreal distortions; Conrad's is a dark, brooding prose as tempered and inauspicious as blinding banalities of our daily lives, and it these complacencies that he uses to deliver an ultimate shock. Conrad aims here at the absolute vortex of the British Empire--really, of the entire West--at that crossroads between global politics and the most individual of covenants. The knowledge found there manifests a total psychological collapse, one that leaves the cruel mechanisms of reality horrifically untouched.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: It will not dissapoint you.
Review:
Its important to remember, that the novel is written at a time when democracy is not exactly well spread through Europe, and most of the continental countries are having a hard time trying to understand why the English shelter anarchists and Marxists and even allow them to publish their works.
No doubt that Conrad met a few of them in literary or social circles and found them amusing in their contradictions. That is why the "criminal mastermind" Mr. Verloc is portrayed more as a very lazy bourgeois than someone whose mind is set upon creating the conditions to change society.
On the other hand, Conrad is faithful to its belief on the perennial existence if not preeminence, of a dark side of the soul in everyone. So the atmosphere in which every character dwells is gloomy, sad and purposefully shows that no motivation is really beyond a person's self interest, even if you claim that you are doing it for God and country, to save the planet or your mother.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Great novel by Conrad
Review: Anarchism was a big thing in the late 19th century and early 20th century (you can compare it with the situation of Islamic terrorism today). Several kings, presidents and other politicians were killed by anarchists during that epoch (US president McKinley and Austrian Empress Sissi was among them). Conrad's book is one of the best novels about the anarchist world, dealing with an anarchist cell working in London during that time. The protagonist, Verloc, is the head of the cell and also an informer for the police and an agent for an unnamed foreign country (thus, he is a triple agent) and his attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory ends tragically for an unwitting member of his family. Note: Conrad amusingly says in the prologue that he never personally met an anarchist himself, but the main story is based on real events he probably picked up from the press of the time.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Prophetic Tale
Review: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent brought up many interesting topics for discussion. The group of motifs Conrad chose to weave into his 1907 novel is highly political in nature: Anarchist views, science, capitalism, socialism, idealization, private ownership, poverty, the police, and possibly even Muslim extremism. For a novel written when it was, in many places The Secret Agent seemed an almost prophetic tale of Mr. Verloc, a secret agent in London.
Interestingly enough, its first prophetic topic is of great importance in today's terror-stricken world, the plot of the story centering mainly on an Anarchist terrorist plot to put one of their followers, Mr. Verloc, in charge of blowing up an observatory. His method of choice, the suicide bomber, is eerily familiar to today's reader. What makes this suicide bomber plot all the more interesting are the obscure details Conrad includes that led me to question whether Verloc and his family were, in fact, Muslim. In Sir Ethelred and the Assistant Commissioner's chapter ten discussion, the Assistance Commissioner's thoughts question the country's domestic policy and focus on his battle against the "paynim (heathen/Muslim) Cheeseman," which is Verloc. Toward the end, Conrad describes Mrs. Verloc as walking around town covered in black except for her eyes. These two details combine to add a Muslim thread to this already visionary terrorist suicide bombing plot in London, curiously reminiscent of recent world events.
Stevie's comments to Mrs. Verloc on the taxi were intriguing as well, receiving new life from the recent New Orleans natural disaster. Stevie's sympathy for the poor taxi driver and poor horse lead him to wonder why the police don't fight to stop injustice. Mrs. Verloc's response, "They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have" is followed by Stevie's question of "What, not even if they were hungry?" The way the media portrayed and the police responded to the "looting" in New Orleans was the answer to Stevie's question: "Yes, that's the police's job even if the poor are hungry."
The Secret Agent, even though nearly a century old, brings to the forefront topics that seem to our world today fairly new. The details connect with the reader because of their strange relevance, spurring conversation about the various topics listed above.
Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: This act of madness and despair
Review: This novel is confusing, melodramatic and contains too many improbable developments.
Its main character, Verloc, considers himself as an anarchist, although his role is 'the protection of the social mechanism', because 'protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury'.
As an 'agent provocateur' for a foreign country, he is forced (otherwise he looses his job) to organize a terrorist attack, which should 'waken up the middle classes' against 'unhygienic labour' in Great-Britain.
He is also a spy on revolutionary activities of a small club of leftists fanatics (a combination of marxists and anarchists).
Conrad's superlative style is everything except subtle: 'the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour' and 'the poor, pathetically mendacious, miserably authenticated by the horrible breath of cheap rum and soap-suds', seem to contradict a 'bad world for poor people'.
The writing is sloppy. One time, an organization is called the Central Red Committee, another time, the International Red Committee. A 'Central' Committee seems rather bizarre for anarchists ('I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.')
A dialogue between a police chief and a pure anarchist ('looking for the blow to open the first crack in the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society') seems improbable, as well as the short love story between Verloc's wife and another anarchist, at the end.
However, certain aspects of the novel are very actual, like the use of 'a weak-minded creature with carefully indoctrinated loyalty and blind docility and devotion', to carry out the fatal terrorist attack. Also actual is the following sentence: 'the existence of secret agents should not be tolerated, as tending to augment the positive dangers of evil'.
This book has not the same high standard as Conrad's masterpieces like 'Hearth of Darkness' and 'Lord Jim'.
Only for Conrad fans.
Review Summary: A Secret Agency
Review: Conrad still suffers today from the same pigeon-hole that his writing was pounded into during his own lifetime. He is still seen as harbinger of distant seas, of the exotic, the foreign. He is best known for Heart of Darkness, a book immortalized in pop culture by Francis Ford Coppola's retelling of this long, tormented short story as a Vietnam epic in Apocalypse Now.
And yet, The Secret Agent is a book that rivals, if not matches or exceeds, that great horror of the English cannon. This is more than a novel about terrorism, this is a terrorist novel. It's a book about poverty and squalor, about the obfuscated struggles of humanity; it conspires to build our ideals into violent extremes, chipping at a suffering domesticity negotiated in silence, then lets them fall in the babble of gutted secrets. This violence is not thrusted upon us in a language that dazzles tired eyes with surreal distortions; Conrad's is a dark, brooding prose as tempered and inauspicious as blinding banalities of our daily lives, and it these complacencies that he uses to deliver an ultimate shock. Conrad aims here at the absolute vortex of the British Empire--really, of the entire West--at that crossroads between global politics and the most individual of covenants. The knowledge found there manifests a total psychological collapse, one that leaves the cruel mechanisms of reality horrifically untouched.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: It will not dissapoint you.
Review:
Its important to remember, that the novel is written at a time when democracy is not exactly well spread through Europe, and most of the continental countries are having a hard time trying to understand why the English shelter anarchists and Marxists and even allow them to publish their works.
No doubt that Conrad met a few of them in literary or social circles and found them amusing in their contradictions. That is why the "criminal mastermind" Mr. Verloc is portrayed more as a very lazy bourgeois than someone whose mind is set upon creating the conditions to change society.
On the other hand, Conrad is faithful to its belief on the perennial existence if not preeminence, of a dark side of the soul in everyone. So the atmosphere in which every character dwells is gloomy, sad and purposefully shows that no motivation is really beyond a person's self interest, even if you claim that you are doing it for God and country, to save the planet or your mother.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Great novel by Conrad
Review: Anarchism was a big thing in the late 19th century and early 20th century (you can compare it with the situation of Islamic terrorism today). Several kings, presidents and other politicians were killed by anarchists during that epoch (US president McKinley and Austrian Empress Sissi was among them). Conrad's book is one of the best novels about the anarchist world, dealing with an anarchist cell working in London during that time. The protagonist, Verloc, is the head of the cell and also an informer for the police and an agent for an unnamed foreign country (thus, he is a triple agent) and his attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory ends tragically for an unwitting member of his family. Note: Conrad amusingly says in the prologue that he never personally met an anarchist himself, but the main story is based on real events he probably picked up from the press of the time.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Prophetic Tale
Review: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent brought up many interesting topics for discussion. The group of motifs Conrad chose to weave into his 1907 novel is highly political in nature: Anarchist views, science, capitalism, socialism, idealization, private ownership, poverty, the police, and possibly even Muslim extremism. For a novel written when it was, in many places The Secret Agent seemed an almost prophetic tale of Mr. Verloc, a secret agent in London.
Interestingly enough, its first prophetic topic is of great importance in today's terror-stricken world, the plot of the story centering mainly on an Anarchist terrorist plot to put one of their followers, Mr. Verloc, in charge of blowing up an observatory. His method of choice, the suicide bomber, is eerily familiar to today's reader. What makes this suicide bomber plot all the more interesting are the obscure details Conrad includes that led me to question whether Verloc and his family were, in fact, Muslim. In Sir Ethelred and the Assistant Commissioner's chapter ten discussion, the Assistance Commissioner's thoughts question the country's domestic policy and focus on his battle against the "paynim (heathen/Muslim) Cheeseman," which is Verloc. Toward the end, Conrad describes Mrs. Verloc as walking around town covered in black except for her eyes. These two details combine to add a Muslim thread to this already visionary terrorist suicide bombing plot in London, curiously reminiscent of recent world events.
Stevie's comments to Mrs. Verloc on the taxi were intriguing as well, receiving new life from the recent New Orleans natural disaster. Stevie's sympathy for the poor taxi driver and poor horse lead him to wonder why the police don't fight to stop injustice. Mrs. Verloc's response, "They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have" is followed by Stevie's question of "What, not even if they were hungry?" The way the media portrayed and the police responded to the "looting" in New Orleans was the answer to Stevie's question: "Yes, that's the police's job even if the poor are hungry."
The Secret Agent, even though nearly a century old, brings to the forefront topics that seem to our world today fairly new. The details connect with the reader because of their strange relevance, spurring conversation about the various topics listed above.
Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: This act of madness and despair
Review: This novel is confusing, melodramatic and contains too many improbable developments.
Its main character, Verloc, considers himself as an anarchist, although his role is 'the protection of the social mechanism', because 'protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury'.
As an 'agent provocateur' for a foreign country, he is forced (otherwise he looses his job) to organize a terrorist attack, which should 'waken up the middle classes' against 'unhygienic labour' in Great-Britain.
He is also a spy on revolutionary activities of a small club of leftists fanatics (a combination of marxists and anarchists).
Conrad's superlative style is everything except subtle: 'the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour' and 'the poor, pathetically mendacious, miserably authenticated by the horrible breath of cheap rum and soap-suds', seem to contradict a 'bad world for poor people'.
The writing is sloppy. One time, an organization is called the Central Red Committee, another time, the International Red Committee. A 'Central' Committee seems rather bizarre for anarchists ('I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.')
A dialogue between a police chief and a pure anarchist ('looking for the blow to open the first crack in the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society') seems improbable, as well as the short love story between Verloc's wife and another anarchist, at the end.
However, certain aspects of the novel are very actual, like the use of 'a weak-minded creature with carefully indoctrinated loyalty and blind docility and devotion', to carry out the fatal terrorist attack. Also actual is the following sentence: 'the existence of secret agents should not be tolerated, as tending to augment the positive dangers of evil'.
This book has not the same high standard as Conrad's masterpieces like 'Hearth of Darkness' and 'Lord Jim'.
Only for Conrad fans.