Now there is a disappointment.
Conrad is one of those authors you are supposed to read and adore. He’s also right up my alley with works on international intrigue, world exploration, and the like. I’d dipped into Heart of Darkness n the past and never finished it when younger.
Here it was recommended to read The Secret Agent as a work covering late 19th century London full of anarchists, socialists, scheming Russians, terrorist plots, and so on. All of which makes it very relevant to our current world. The work also had been turned into a film in 1942 by Alfred Hitchcock that I had watched recently and GREATLY enjoyed, retitled as Sabotage and contains some much improved plot elements as well as reduced cast of characters. .
Unfortunately, this is the rare case where the film is much better than the written word. While Hitchcock’s work is tight and focused and moves with purpose (not shocking given the director) Conrad’s work is intensely wordy and drags for 300+ pages. Conrad writes as if he is paid by the word and brevity is not a skill of his shown here. Characters are introduced and dropped without resolution (see the Chief Inspector as an example) and overall concluding actions are immensely dissatisfying.
Now. the book isn’t without merit. There are a number of one liners here describing the hypocrisy of communism/socialism and its adherents as well as their anarchist supporters are fantastic and appropriately scathing. There is not a member of London’s counter culture that comes out looking well—depraved, basic, ignorant and nihilistic are the common depictions and Conrad pull no punches or uses any “greys” in his coloring.
Its unfortunate then that you can flip the book open to any page and find a sentence like this “The walls of the houses were wet, the mud of the roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him". Its just…too….much….A reader loses the thread about 20 syllables into the sentence and you forget where you even started the thought. So much more could be accomplished with so less.
Hitchcock knew this. Go watch the film. Ignore the book.