The Secret Agent

⚖The case for it

Verloc keeps a shabby Soho shop, informs for an embassy, and is pushed into something he has no talent for. The anarchists around him are the joke: an ageing idealist, a bitter old radical, an opportunist, and a bomb-maker called the Professor, “macabre yet pathetically funny” rather than frightening. Conrad’s London is “all rain and fog and mud” with a “rusty little halo of mist,” which readers call the best rendering of the city they have read. Winnie holds “a combination of vulnerability and strength.” Each chapter is “a different view, through a different set of eyes.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The chronology “digresses and falls back on itself,” jumping “between the past and present without warning,” and readers lose the thread badly enough to restart rather than resume. Between bursts of incident sit long stretches of interior description, “plodding as the pace is,” which asks more patience than a book subtitled a simple tale seems to promise. Conrad’s vocabulary makes it “more like a chore than a pleasure” for some. And readers drawn in by the title get a character study and a social satire: “just don’t pick it up expecting James Bond.”

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings