Secret Agent (Version 3)

The Secret Agent is Joseph Conrad's chilling masterpiece about the ordinary monsters among us. Based on a real 1894 anarchist bombing in London, it follows Adolf Verloc, a mild-mannered shopkeeper and secret agent for a foreign government who is pressured into committing an act of terrorist violence against the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. What begins as a darkly comic tale of espionage and bungled conspiracy becomes something far more unsettling: a penetrating study of how easily radical politics devolves into nihilistic destruction, and how the people closest to us can be strangers indeed. Verloc moves through a world of double agents, pompous revolutionaries, and corrupt officials, all while hiding his true calling from his wife Winnie and her innocent brother. The bomb, when it finally explodes, is almost anticlimax. The real violence is quieter: the betrayal of love, the self-interest masquerading as ideology, and the way everyone, in the end, is playing a part.