The Secret Agent

⚖The case for it

Verloc keeps a seedy shop and a quieter job, feeding scraps to a foreign embassy that leans on him to fake an atrocity and frighten London toward repression. Conrad, admittedly, has little use for the revolutionaries who crowd his middle chapters, and their debating drags. Skip lightly over those parts. Underneath the intrigue lives a marriage and a household, and the book keeps drifting toward the people inside it: Winnie, her ailing mother, her gentle brother Stevie. The domestic ache Conrad finds there is something few writers have matched.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Conrad keeps the actual bombing offstage and spends his pages on long static scenes among anarchists he plainly despises, who arrive as caricatures: the portly Michaelis, the posturing Ossipon, the Professor with his detonator. The irony is laid on so thick and so cold that the book can feel less narrated than sneered at. Winnie is most of the life in it.

— the honest librarian