The Secret Agent is set among the political refugees and anarchist conspirators who gathered in late Victorian London. The central character, Verloc, is an agent provocateur in the pay of the Russian embassy, whose seedy Soho shop acts as a meeting place for dissidents from around the world who have washed up in London. Not only is Verloc working with the Russians, he is also passing on information to a Scotland Yard inspector, but his cosy relationship with the authorities is doomed to come to an end. Instructed by his employers at the embassy to manufacture an outrage that will both discredit the anarchists in the city and shock the powers that be into taking a stronger line with them, Verloc decides upon a bomb attack on the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and he dupes his simple-minded brother-in-law Stevie into carrying the explosive. When the bomb explodes prematurely and Stevie dies, Verloc's long-suffering wife Winnie finally turns against him. Her hopes of escape with Comrade Ossipon, one of the habitues of her husband's backroom meetings, are as doomed to disaster as Verloc's inept plots. Taking the basic outline of his story from a real-life attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory in 1894, which ended in the death of the would-be bomber, Conrad creates a claustrophobic world of violence and paranoia that, despite the date of the book's publication, still seems entirely modern. Minor characters, like the walking bomb who calls himself "the Professor" (he has explosives permanently strapped around his body so that he can blow himself up at any second), are not only memorable but, in the present day, painfully prescient. Conrad's narrative, which invests the basic melodrama of what he calls in his subtitle "a simple tale" with a cruel and clear-eyed irony, depicts a London anarchist underworld in which every character is morally compromised.

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