![]() Verlock lives with his young wife Winnie and her slightly disabled kid brother Stevie, atop a store on a run down street in London. Verlock is an agent for the French embassy in London, yet, at the same time, an activist for an anarchist revolution. Posted By Sacred Cow at Tue, 10:07 PM in The Secret Agent || 1 ReplyĬonrad's The Secret Agent (Don't get excited, I can't underline from my browser.) is the brilliantly written story of the life of an anarchist in England at the turn of the century. And then Comrade Ossipon's final indignity can't help but make me think that this is an early feminist critique of the mistreatment of women.Īlso at the end of the novel there seems to be a kind of word play at work in Conrad's constant reiteration of the newspaper account of Winnie's end: "An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang forever." This echoes off of Winnie's fixation in the same chapter of another newspaper account "The drop given was fourteen feet." Maybe someone else can clarify this better. Someone mentioned the growing suffragette movement in England at the time The Secret Agent was written, and it is interesting to think of how we come to think of Winnie as such a shallow nonentity, but then she really starts to come alive as a person once someone has taken away her maternal object and her sole reason for living (in her mind), her brother Stevie. I'm especially impressed by the contrast between the macabre humor (all the growing cowardice so hysterically portrayed) and the very sorry and sad end for Winnie. I wonder if anyone else noticed or agrees with how amazingly this is portrayed by Conrad. But when they arrive at the shop and the truth of what Winnie did to Verloc slowly starts dawning in his idiotic mind, the description of Ossipon's growing horror and fright is one of the funniest things I've ever read in literature. I thought the depiction of Winnie's encounter with Ossipon (P*ss on? P*ss Upon?) was fabulously drawn - this cheap, weak, sorry excuse of a man who Winnie suddenly turns to for a chance of salvation - all the time his mind is on sex with her. Posted By lawrence at Tue, 10:07 PM in The Secret Agent || 0 RepliesĪ strong impression of the novel didn't really hit me until near the end - from Chapt. For long stretches we never hear about them. We have along chapter to see what they think but then some of them reappear only towards the end. Moreover, some the anarchists neraly evaporate. In my view, chapter 11 needs drastic cutting. But how can one expect further empathy with him when he starts discussing the immediate future with Winnie when the latter is so overwhelmed with grief? It is time for silence rather than to expect a character who has been sorely hurt to think about solving practical problems : escape or running the shop while Verloc is in prison. We are aware that he is acting under strain - the infernal orders of Valdimir and we know that he never imagined that Stevie would be blown up. This may sway us as readers into sympathising with him but we have never condemned this character outright. Conrad seems to have run out of steam here and in try to explore this relationship he places all his hopes in convincing us through Verloc's interior monologue. But I find this chpter is unnecessarily prolonged and repetitive. So, sometimes, one finds five or more adjectives in a single sentence as if a noun could not be forceful enough to convey the meaning the author intended.Ĭhapter 11 is the crucial one because it reveals that Mr.Verloc and Winnie never managed to communicate. ![]() Conrad seems to have relied too much on adjectives to do the work. 'The Secret Agent' is overwritten at times. In the daytime the door remained closed in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.-Submitted by Anonymous The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was small, and so was the house. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions. ![]() The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verlac, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. ![]() In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. ![]()
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