The Secret Agent

⚖The case for it

A terrorist bombing in London, seen through the eyes of the bomber's handler, his ideologically confused superior, and his entirely innocent family. Conrad's darkest novel: anarchism, police surveillance, political violence rendered in prose of extraordinary compression. The model for the political thriller as moral tragedy.

— the canon

✕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's revenge is most of the life in it.

— the honest librarian