The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

About the book

Mr Verloc runs a small London shop while maintaining less visible connections with political activists and foreign interests. Pressure from those connections disturbs an arrangement in which domestic life and secret work have seemed able to coexist. Conrad moves among officials, conspirators, and family members, showing how differently each understands the same people and events. The novel's irony often comes from the disproportion between grand public language and shabby personal motives. Its treatment of political violence centres on consequences that those making plans fail, or refuse, to imagine. Winnie Verloc's household gives the intrigue an emotional weight beyond the world of espionage. Readers are asked to notice how dependence, indifference, and incomplete knowledge can make private lives answer for other people's abstractions.

• Political violence
• Domestic dependence
• Moral indifference

Why read it

For the unsettling precision with which a political plot becomes a tragedy of ordinary relationships.

English text