Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Agent'

Trying to decide if you “liked” a book can become a complicated process. Oh, not for some books. Some books catch you quickly and slyly sink in and mingle with your reality and whisper to you during the day when you are supposed to be working or driving or running. But there are some just plain stubborn books; books that almost seem to be daring you to put them down and move on to something else. Conrad’s The Secret Agent affected me that way. I read the Introduction, the select Bibliography, the Chronology and the Author’s preface and was very intrigued. I loved learning about the parallels in the story with the events in the author’s life. I liked seeing what historical events were taking place during the time Conrad was working in the Belgian

Verloc. He’s married a woman who looks after her invalid mother and her “not quite right” brother. Winnie Verlock has settled for this existence. Her husband runs a store that sells male potency pills and soft porn. He doesn’t do much business, but Winnie asks no questions and tolerates life. Suddenly her life is disrupted when an officer comes to the house with a cloth with their address written on it which was taken from the body that was blown into a million bits and pieces and had to be collected with a shovel after being disintegrated by a bomb which was intended for the Greenwich Observatory. Her brother is missing and it dawns on her that her brother was wearing the coat which had the cloth address sewn into it. Her husband is responsible for the murder of her

But after we meet Winnie, and Adolf and Stevie and Mr. Vladimir we have to have conversation after conversation between Mr. Verloc, the secret agent, and the First Secretary of the Embassy and Mr. Vladimir and other shady characters and I’d find myself very disengaged and instead of escaping from reality with my book I’d be sorting out some work entanglement or planning dinner or (worse than anything) silently singing a small inane segment of some pop tune. I found I didn’t care if this was one of the first books about a terrorist act. The whole engaging conversation that had occurred earlier in the book about how anarchists should make it clear that they are “determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation” by “directing [their:] blows at something outside the ordinary passions of humanity” which had intrigued me so much in the beginning suddenly was forgotten and I cared so much more about the split-end I had just spotted or who was driving by in that loud car. In short, the book became very tedious and I lost any concern for the characters or about the