The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

What has been called Conrad's "most chilling novel" is set around an actual historical event, the 1894 anarchist attack on London's Greenwich Observatory. Conrad uses this terrorist outrage to examine the darkness and duplicity of human nature, while London itself takes on all the semblance of a individual, a gloomy, quasi-Gothic location, a haunting presence that colours and informs the cynical, self-interested behaviour of its inhabitants. In Conrad's own opinion 'The Secret Agent' has "doubt, fear... a black horror in every page..." The novel's themes are universal, and raise questions pertinent to terrorist activities in our own time.