A favourite classic
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For some years, this intriguing novel has been a favourite of mine. Conrad leads the reader through a cunning series of plots and subplots, all the while creating an atmosphere of discontent and darkness. The distinct characteristics of Mr Verloc will interest and bemuse the reader for many hours along the main plot of this novel. Anarchy has never been so readily depicted in classic literature.
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Precisely too many words
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I read another review that describes Conrad's prose as dense, difficult and gorgeous. I'm not sure about the last adjective. This is Conrad at his most dense and difficult. Almost impenetrable, one might say. For the opposite end of his scale see the earlier Lord Jim or the later Shadow Line. They are light and breezy by comparison.
I read this book about two years ago and can hardly remember a thing about it. It has a memorable bomb scene in Greenwich Park. I can't even remember where the rest of it is set. Somewhere in the West End, maybe?
Conrad is an author I often hate to love, but find myself loving nonetheless. One thing I do like about him is that the sunny, tropical locations lighten the density and difficulty of the surface prose. It's like a dirty window looking onto a sunny day. But that's not right. There is somehting precise, almost surgical, about Conrad's prose that is far from 'dirty'. The Secret Agent, set in an almost Dickensian, misty, murky C19 London, doesn't have the appeal of these tropically-set works, anyway.
I'll probably come back to The Secret Agent one day, as I probably will Nostomo, his other supremely dense, difficult book.
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Not all that simple
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Conrad's prose is dense, difficult and gorgeous. Before you pick up a book like this, you need to prepare yourself for an author who will happily write eight pages or so of prose between two lines in a conversation and not apologise (in fact there is, as is customary for Conrad, a self-justifying foreword). Patience will reward you with a surprising and darkly humorous tale of anarchists learning that real sources of chaos, anarchy and violence have little to do with abstract ideas.
It's not much like Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is perhaps more important in the history of literature, but this is bigger, richer and more enjoyable. Read both.
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The human side of the underworld
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Conrad leads us into 19th Century London, allowing us an immersion into an underground world of anarchists and the strings pulling on them. The group of anarchists, though bound by a certain political directionality, is presented to us as unstructured, a loose association of very idiosyncratic individuals who on the whole seem more like the comical caricature of dejected rebels. And so, setting aside great political insights, Conrad zooms into the peculiar lives of these individuals that form the underworld. In particular, we witness the failed efforts of Mr. Verloc, the secret agent, to prokove the masses by planting a bomb. The emotional distance and strained relationship with other individuals including his wife is to have devastating consequences for him. The author has a fantastic ability to depict his characters, to describe in detail the exteriorisation of their intense psychological states, and thus to invoke powerful images of the scenes. One is a true witness to the events unfolding.
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A Passage to Blighty
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E.M. Forster apparently said something to the effect that Conrad's London in 'The Secret Agent' was too dark a place: a foreigners projection of European anxieties onto, in reality, a far more benevolent scene. It's true, Conrad's vision of England's capital is dark, but you'd have to say that it is no darker than, say, moments in Dickens', or even T.S. Eliot's 'Wasteland'. Developments in both the world of Crime Thrillers, and in the reality of terrorism and espionage suggest that Conrad was certainly onto something. Indeed, many now current clichés of the genre can be seen to originate from Conrad's book: mainly that the criminal and the policeman; the terrorist and the 'keeper of the peace' are not worlds apart. Few contemporary writers, however, are quite as keen and scrupulous as Conrad, who is never shy of taking us into the deepest and darkest places in the modern political psyche. Conrad's prose is as intensely atmospheric, as psychologically penetrating, and as layered with ironies as anything you will read in English. Sometimes it takes an 'outsider view' to tell you hard things about your beloved little Island. You won't get Merchant Ivory touching Conrad.
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