The Secret AgentThe Secret Agent

Set in late nineteenth-century London, this is a prophetic examination of contemporary terrorism and the literary precursor to the espionage novels of such writers as Graham Greene and John Le Carré. Conrad paints a corrupt London underworld where terrorists and politicians, grotesques and foreign diplomats, fanatics and fashionable society are surprisingly intermingled. Mr. Verloc is a double agent who operates a seedy shop in Soho, where he lives with his wife, her mother, and her idiot brother. When Verloc is assigned a dangerous act of sabotage, it has disastrous repercussions for his own family. As Conrad brilliantly explores the confused motives that lie at the heart of terrorism, his savagely ironic voice is concerned not just with politics, but with the desperate fates of ordinary people.