The Secret Agent

Written by Joseph Conrad

Narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith

William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time.

Intrigue, espionage, and anarchy abound in what is still considered Conrad’s finest novel. Adolf Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police, is embroiled in a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. When the attack goes awry, Verloc must face the consequences.

Beloved star of the screen and stage, Tim Pigott Smith provides a thrilling narration of this strikingly relevant tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780008447618

Joseph Conrad

Polish-born Joseph Conrad is regarded as a highly influential author, and his works are seen as a precursor to modernist literature. His often tragic insight into the human condition in novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent is unrivalled by his contemporaries.

Reviews for The Secret Agent

[jtodd1973 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I think Conrad was like Carver (you never thought you'd see that comparison, did you?): he should have stuck with the short form, which in Conrad's case was the novella. I don't think you could call anything Conrad wrote "short". This was a great story stretched out over much too many pages.

[leslie398 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Despite its name, this is not a James Bond type story. First of all, it is set in 1880s London and involves a small group of mostly ineffectual anarchists. Secondly, the primary characteristic of the main "secret agent" is laziness! Conrad gives us wonderful portraits of these disaffected men, each of whom is disgruntled for different reasons, as well as the rest of the Verloc family.

As I was reading this, I kept having the sensation of deja vu. I knew that I had never read this before, but certain aspects were extremely familiar to me and in one important part I knew in advance what was coming. Finally I realized that Alfred Hitchcock had based one of his early movies - Sabotage - on this book! I am a big fan of Hitchcock (and have seen Sabotage more than once), but although his movie is quite exciting (even more thrills than the book), it doesn't capture Conrad's characters and has a completely different (and more conventional) ending. The book features complex characters and motivations which are perhaps slower and less exciting but will stay with me longer.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Spy thriller that clearly heavily influenced le Carre. I really enjoyed the slow burn into incandescence.

[nesum_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting read. Conrad's style meanders around the plot beautifully, following one character to another, and around until it finally reaches the point. In a story about anarchists, the flow of the book works very well. In the hands of a lesser writer, I would complain that the book was too long for such a simple tale, but Conrad handles the leangth quite well, and I have no such complaint.

[rocketjk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A few years ago I began a personal tradition of starting each year's reading with a reread of a Joseph Conrad novel. This year it was The Secret Agent, a book I did a massive amount of research about during my grad school days. The book, set in London in late 19/early 20th century, tells the story of Adolph Verloc, who is too indolent to work and so makes his living in the employ of an Eastern European embassy, spying on London's anarchists. When Verloc's employer puts pressure on him to create an anarchist outrage so that a too tolerant English society will decide to crack down on the anarchists in their midst, Verloc's troubles begin. We also follow at times the anarchists themselves and the police. But this is really only the framework for a broader portrayal of the ways in which Conrad saw the growing industrialization and impersonality of society as a destroyer of hope, incentive and emotion and as a promoter of alienation and despair. At the center of these themes are Verloc's home life, and especially the ways in which his wife has married him as a form of personal compromise, away from happiness but for security for herself, her indigent mother and her mentally challenged brother. But Conrad's themes are equally evident in his descriptions of the city itself, its filth, slime and darkness. Also, very unusual for its time was Conrad's bending of time, showing us important episodes out of chronological order in ways that make us feel that time itself is standing still.Conrad had nothing but contempt for anarchists, and to a lesser degree for politics as a whole. He saw anarchists as parasites, people looking to tear down, but not to contribute to the daily business of getting along and getting on with life. Conrad, after all, came of age on merchant ships, a world where each man depended for his life on the other fellow doing his job all the time, and where even the most menial task could be crucial. But that level of contempt is the book's flaw, as Conrad let his antipathy run away with him, here. Consequently, the anarchists come off as mere caricatures, and the narrative loses power when they take center stage. As always, though, I am in love with Conrad's turn of a phrase and with his powers of observation.

[breadhat · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was kind of interesting in one way that I didn't at all expect, and mostly uninteresting in the aspects that I expected to like. It is famous as a prototype of the political thriller genre, and certainly a lot of the familiar themes are there, but the narrative structure is completely different. To the extent that it fits into any genre, this book plays out more like a murder mystery, and even in that context the plot unfolds in a strange way. One major event happens about a quarter of the way through the book, and everything after that revolves around the characters (and the reader) trying to figure out what exactly that major event was. The novelty of Conrad's approach, or at least the divergence from my expectations, lent the book some interest to me; however, it wasn't enough to make this an especially compelling experience overall.

What Conrad has to say about political extremism may have been good for the time, but I feel like our current geopolitical climate has led to some more nuanced explorations. At least, we've now had more time to think about terrorism. This book seems to hinge around the thesis that ideologies are little more than high-minded justifications for baser psychological impulses like greed and sexual inadequacy. I think there is quite a bit of truth to that, but it really isn't exciting or complex enough of an insight to successfully anchor an entire novel.

[mausergem_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story starts as a comedy and ends in tragedy. Its a story of Mr.Verloc, a married man with a small bookstand. He is also a secret agent employed by a foreign govrnment and works with the revolutionaries and anarchists in the country. One day he is summoned by the new ambassador to the foreign embassy and is ridiculed upon his appearance and given a task to create dread in the common populance by blowing up the Greenwich park. He consults his anarchist friends and goes ahead with a plan that ends up hurting his innocent family.A beautifully narrated story. Conrad has a style of mixing comedy and serious events in the story.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Secret Agent is another Conrad mystery, great for descriptions of locale and depth of characters, but slow and weak with plot.Once again, there was no character whose fate readers might connect to or care about.

[aliciamay_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr. Verloc is a Russian secret agent keeping a shop in London where he lives with his wife, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother. Mr. Verloc has become comfortable and lazy in his role, but the Russian ambassador insists on action. Verloc puts together a bomb plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and implicate the anarchists, but things go disastrously wrong. This novel is said to be the precursor of the espionage thriller. While it was very subdued compared to the modern thriller, I found it to be pretty engrossing. It was interesting to see the motivations the characters had for their actions and the how the unforeseen affects of the bombing played out in so many lives.

[brendan.h · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Far better than expected, some of the interior monologue was just fantastic. Extra points because terrorism, counter-espionage and the manipulation of public opinion thereon is so damn timely.

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A solid book, and a good choice for people who want to read something by Conrad besides Heart of Darkness- not that the works have much in common.

Conrad paints the world of secret agents as one joined because of financial interests, not ardent belief or nationalism or some other soft motivation. It's a bit cynical, but variety of perspectives is the spice of life. Governments here treat their agents as salaried employees expected to produce results, while the agents see the governments that pay them as witless bureaucrats who should stay silent and just keep forking over the money.

The most interesting part of this book is the structure. You can piece together what has happened rather early in the book, and through the point of view of a detective character this suspicion is confirmed. The tension is created by waiting for the character who will take the news the worst to learn of it. Tension is ratcheted up by hinting at just how bad that character is going to take the news. Then there's a payoff that doesn't disappoint, even if it could have been arrived at faster without doing any harm to the narrative.

The final section has some beautiful writing, with vivid descriptions of London. I was irritated that some threads, particularly that of the detective character, were left dangling. If The Secret Agent had been tighter and all the stories tied up this would have been a four star book, as it stands it's somewhere above three stars but not all the way there.

[buffalogr · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher. While this is one of the classics, it did not grab me in a couple hours of dedicated listening, so I put it aside. This is the third try, so I give up.

[ohernaes · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing. About anarchist terrorists in London around the end of the 19th century, but one hears little concrete of either anarchism or terrorism, only about the not too interesting characters. One of the characters is supposed to have been an inspiration for the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.

[blake.rosser · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A pretty cool Conrad story, and refreshing in that it's not about some guy on a boat.

[stephenbarkley · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reading The Secret Agent is work. It takes effort to follow Conrad's unconventional use of English. It takes effort to understand where the plot is going. I'll be honest—it takes effort to pick the book up of the night stand and read another chapter!Just when I was preparing to dismiss this book, I made it to the last three chapters. If the whole book was as psychologically profound and tense as these chapters, Conrad would have had something!In the end, it was too little too late. I can't recommend reading this book. I can't even understand why it made it into the ranks of Everyman's Library.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious. The Secret Agent was first printed in 1907 and is based on actual events, the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1894. Mr. Verloc, who runs a pornographic shop, is summoned to a foriegn Embassy in London. There he is revealed to be a secret agent. There is a new man at the Embassy and he believes that Mr Verloc is no longer being productive as a spy. The new man, Mr Vladimir, sees himself as a man of action and suggests that Mr. Verloc should set off a bomb in some scientific place to prove his worth and to try and shake Britain's perceived liberal attitude.Mr. Verloc is married to a beautiful, younger woman and lives with her, her mother and her simple minded brother Stevie whom is cared for devotedly by his sister Mrs Verloc. He holds meetings at his shop with fellow anarchists.When a man blows up in Greenwich Park Mr. Verloc is believed to be the victim but it is actually his brother-in-law who has died. The police also are immediately suspicious of Mr. Verloc, and a Chief Inspector Heat visits the shop and informs the unaware Mrs Verloc that her brother has died. She is naturally devastated and blames her husband as well with shocking results.In many respects this is a very simple plot about an attack on a British building concocted by a foreign power and packed with characters that are allegorical in nature, the wily foreigner Mr Vladimir, the meddling policeman Chief Inspector Heat and his ambitious boss, a haughty politician in Sir Ethelred, yet it is one full of powerful emotions. Love, pride and duplicity to name but a few. However, perhaps the most important emotion is conceit or maybe self-worth. Mr Vladimir believes himself a man of action but is obviously rocked when his part in the bomb plot is exposed, Heat believes he knows and can prove who the offender is without bothering to look at the evidence but this idea of inflated self-worth is particularly evident in Mr Verloc. He seems comfortable in his comfy married life but his world is rocked when his value as an informer is questioned and when his part in the bombing is revealed he believes that he is important enough to cause major embarrassment to the respective authorities yet his is but a minor role in a bigger game. This point is nicely illustrated as two of his fellow anarchists are seen walking down the crowded street alone, "one endeavouring to secure himself in the conviction that 'He was a force' with the power to regenerate the world, the other with his self-conception in ruins".So saying all that why did I not give it a higher rating. To be perfectly honest I felt that the author rather over-indulged in the minutia of minor details which stopped rather than enhanced the flow of the story for my taste. That said it is still a worthy read.

[publiusdb-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wish I had read this in the early years after 9/11. While the characters in Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" are not superficially the same as the characters that would figure into the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent events, the themes are eerily similar.

As a piece of literature, though the book is an almost surreal set of disjointed pieces. Each chapter is a different view, through a different set of eyes, and only by looking at them all in turn does the mystery unfold. Methodically, Conrad unfolds each participants thoughts in slow motion, and while he demonstrates a command of the English language that is enviable, as well as a vocabulary that would be substantial for a native speaker and even more so for a sailor whose native tongue was Polish, the slow pace demands a serious reader's attention and patience. You get a full picture in the reading, but you look at every details that unfolds.

And yet, plodding as the pace is, there are surprises. After pages of slow, deliberate character development, a sudden jolt of action with shift the plot, especially as the personal consequences of the underlying act of terror begins to turn the characters in on each other. In this regard, one sees echoes of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or even Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" in the inescapable maelstrom that drags down all who are touched by violent men and violent actions.

Is it heavy, then? Undeniably. Worth the effort? Without question, it is an interesting and fascinating read, and Conrad's prescience, decades before the onset of the terrorism's "golden age," is itself an argument for reading "The Secret Agent."

Just don't pick it up expecting James Bond. He's not here.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book much more than I expected--I had actually never heard of it before finding it on Serial Reader and the 1001 books list.Winnie has spent her life devoted to her mentally disabled brother. She forgoes a true love in order to marry Mr Verloc, who is kind to Stevie and happy to have he (and then her mother) live with them.Winnie is happy enough. She works the store, cares for Stevie, and is satisfied. But then her mother chooses to move into an indigent's home through her late husband's connections--she is worried for Stevie, and feels this move while she is alive is best. But then Winnie learns how her husband truly supports them--it's not the store, he is a secret agent. She has always put up with/enjoyed the gatherings of his revolutionary friends. But now his client is asking too much.

[wirkman_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A college professor once explained to me the brilliant structure and thematic intent of Conrad's "The Secret Agent." I was capitvated by his discourse, so I immediately went out and read the book. What a disappointment.This, alas, is another Guilty Displeasure.Well, not wholly displeasure, and not wholly guilty.I failed to see any "metaphysical interest" in the book, and the structure of this stated "simple story" was not really all that impressive. It is evocative, though, and the parts that kept my interest were very good. But it went on too long, and did not strike me as a very impressive revelation about the mind of a terrorist and saboteur.The Hitchcock movie of this book, "Sabotage," is one of the better of his early sound pictures, though perhaps a failure overall.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic read. I first read this novel as an undergraduate nearly thirty years ago and was immediately taken by the sheer plausibility of it's setting and characters.Re-reading it now I was struck by how contemporary it seems, even though it was originally published as long ago as 1908, during a period in which Britain seemed all to gruesomely concerned with the menace of imminent war with Germany.The various revolutionaries and anarchists have their own well defined networks, but so, too, do the police who struggle pot keep tabs on the various foreign nationals of ill repute. Conrad even delves into the depths of political dispute, introducing an unnamed Home Secretary who is daily attacked in the Commons and lambasted in the popular press.All together this is an impressive journal capturing the suspicious and pessimistic zeitgeist of the time, lovingly rendered in Conrad's characteristically flawless prose.An absolute treat - I just wish I had re-read it far sooner.

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Just in case you think there's something new under the sun, here's a book published in 1907 about fanatical outcasts in a modern who live in a lonely, dirty modern hellscape that dream of committing random acts of terrible violence. More than a hundred very bloody years later, it's interesting to see how much about the way we think about terrorism hasn't changed: the novel's radicals, who range from gormless idealists to bloodthirsty maniacs, seem like recognizable archetypes that might have been found in any of the last century's underground movements. In a titled lady's fawning over a certain incomprehensible, childlike anarchist, a bit of radical chic here. Throughout the novel, Conrad takes pains to illustrate, in turn, their poverty of spirit and their inevitable hypocrisy. It's all horribly familiar. It's also a bit strange to see Joseph Conrad tell a story that has so little do with boats: the only water here seems to fall, interminably, from the gray London sky. It's also weird to see him, in his formal, finely tuned, way, take a decidedly ironic tone. Awful as they are, this novel's terrorists are mostly walking contradictions: for all their grand ideas, they're pitifully flawed humans, as lazy self-seeking, and comfortably bourgeois as the next guy. Conrad deals with their contradictions expertly, and while there aren't any really funny moments here, there's a lot of black comedy to be had. The book's title might refer to a specific character, but absolutely in the book seems to be living a double life, and most of them are at least dimly aware of it. The book has other strengths, including a wonderfully detailed picture of a dreary, dirty Victorian London that may interest readers of historical fiction, but it's big weakness is its tempo. Sentence-for-sentence, Conrad might have been one of the finest authors English has ever produced, but nobody's ever accused him of taking shortcuts. While most of the book's action takes place on a single day, it seems like forever. One can see why the spy novelists that wrote after "The Secret Agent" chose to tell their stories in lean, hard-edged, colorfully profane prose: the author's verbosity, skillful as it is, drains most of the mystery and the fun out of this story. This criticism may be unfair. While his subject matter might make him an obvious inclusion in any "Boy's Own Stories" compilation, I doubt that Conrad was trying to write genre fiction. While this isn't a particularly readable book, more than a century after it was published, it remains a sharply observed and superbly written study in human weakness, political fanaticism, and basic hypocrisy.

[missizicks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. The modernity of it surprised me. Conrad had a good grasp of human nature. His rich prose brings late 19th century London to life, and the intrigues of the life of a secret agent are as well drawn as anything written by John Le Carré almost 100 years later.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A pretty good thriller. but the reader has to wade through hundreds of pages of Conrad's thick prose to get the story. The cops and the anarchists are clearly boobs, and so too are most of the central characters. Doctorow's preface is very worthwhile.

[ameise1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took a while until I could immerse myself in the story. I liked the quiet style for a strong content. First, the reader is introduced to the secret agent as a bore. Despite the fact that he does not spray out of power, his thoughts and actions are very awake. He has the talent to take the people for himself and things to turn so that he comes out fine. But he has the bill not made with his wife, who does not trust him. Likewise, the members of his association to turn away from him and one of them tried to gain profit for himself.I liked the profound story.

[thebentley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There may have been a time, long before this book was written, when its darkly comic vision of politics, revolutionaries, and law enforcement didn't apply. But I doubt there has been a time since. No one understood the dark intersection of politics, money, power, and love quite like Joseph Conrad. Since the moment that the man on the street gained enough power to have an opinion, politics (being all local) has wormed its way into every corner of our lives, and Conrad does a wonderful job of examining those motives. Unlike Sinclair or Rand, however, Conrad's style is not distant or didactic. In fact, the lens can often be so close as to slow the pacing. A very timely book, ahead of its time.

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not bad - not memorable. Considered by some as Conrad's best. If you want his best, read Nostromo.

[alcracka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Like Heart of Darkness, Secret Agent:

- Is deeply cynical
- And heavily allegorical
- And ends with a bang (although this book also begins with one).

I guessed a big part of the plot pretty quickly, so I guess that's a negative...although I'm not sure it was supposed to be hard to guess.

It's about a cheerful, indolent secret agent who's pressed by his superiors to do something big to prove his worth. Complications ensue. And there's a guy who goes around strapped with enough explosives to blow everyone around him to smithereens, and a little rubber bulb in his pocket to trigger it, so no one has the balls to arrest him. I love that guy.

[meganandjustin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this for a class. Not to say that I don't love classics, because I do, but if I hadn't needed to finish this for credit I probably never would have gotten around to it. The writing is gorgeous. The atmosphere is well developed and multi-layered. However, none of the characters are sympathetic. It's hard to care about what happens when I don't care about any of the characters.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took me a long time to read "The Secret Agent," and I don't know precisely why. It's a great book - a true classic, with hardly a sentence that one would chose to edit out - but it was heavy going at times and so dense with literary intent. As an examination of an attempted bomb-plot, and the fall-out that insued, it is masterful.

[akfarrar · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Leopards might not change their spots – but works of literature can certainly change their meaning.Once this was a stylish novel of superior language use, playing with the genre of spies and flooring the ‘le Carrés’ of the future before they even put pen to paper.Well defined major characters and good descriptions – Dickensian almost but nodding to the modern.This time it was a vicious (as only humour can be vicious) satire on certainties and politics.In a world of ocean sized deceit, where atrocities and terrorism originate in ones friends and where one does not really know ‘the enemy’, small lives are wrecked leaving little flotsam to wash ashore.Winnie, whose story this is, is as tragic a figure as you will find in any ‘Bodice Ripper’ – she marries, for the sake of her family, the safe middle class man who lodged with her mother; her mother leaves in order to safeguard the prospects of an idiot son; the son, brother to Winnie, is hardly noticed by Verloc, double agent for a seedy government, until he is pressured to breaking point by an enthusiastic know-nothing (young, First Secretary, Mr Vladimir).No one is to blame – next to nothing happens, but a devastating hole is cut out in the reader’s faith in the essential goodness of the universe.The terror comes with the realisation this is our world – this is the manipulation of modern governments and those agencies set up to protect us – Nothing has changed: If anything, it is more like this than it was at the time of writing.