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Books Like The Secret Agent
What to read after The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) is one of the first great novels about terrorism — Mr. Verloc, a double agent for a foreign embassy, instructed to bomb the Greenwich Observatory; a dark comedy of anarchists, policemen, and embassy officials that ends in something devastating. Still one of the most politically prescient novels in the English language. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's most ambitious novel — the fictional South American republic of Costaguana and the silver mine that corrupts everyone it touches; where The Secret Agent shows political corruption in a London drawing room, Nostromo shows it on a continental scale; the companion to The Secret Agent in Conrad's political fiction and the more difficult of the two
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Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
Jim's jump from the Patna and his attempt at redemption — the most personal of Conrad's major novels and the best starting point for new readers; where The Secret Agent is satirical and London-set, Lord Jim is tragic and set at sea and in the East; the contrast shows the full range of Conrad's fictional modes
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow's journey up the Congo to find Kurtz — Conrad's most famous work and a novella; the companion to The Secret Agent in its examination of what civilization does when it acts without oversight; where The Secret Agent shows the violence at the center of the European political system, Heart of Darkness shows the violence at the center of the European colonial project
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
Fowler and Pyle in 1950s Saigon — the twentieth-century political novel most directly in the tradition of The Secret Agent; where Conrad shows the absurdity of political violence through the eyes of a detached observer, Greene shows it through the eyes of a man who is drawn into complicity; both are about the corruption that political idealism licenses
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré
Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer in Berlin — le Carré is the twentieth-century heir to the tradition Conrad establishes in The Secret Agent: a spy novel that is really about the moral corruption of intelligence work and the way both sides in the Cold War are equally cynical; where Conrad shows this in the context of anarchism and bomb-throwing, le Carré shows it in the context of Cold War ideology
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Under Western Eyes
by Joseph Conrad
Razumov in St. Petersburg and Geneva, a Russian student who betrays a revolutionary and is then forced to become a double agent — Conrad's other major political novel and the companion to The Secret Agent; where The Secret Agent is set in London and satirical in mode, Under Western Eyes is set in Russia and tragic; the most direct Conrad companion to The Secret Agent
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Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
Rubashov, an old Bolshevik, interrogated by the regime he served — the twentieth-century political novel most directly about the same question as The Secret Agent: what happens to the individual when the political system they served turns against them; where Conrad approaches this through the absurdity of Mr. Verloc's situation, Koestler approaches it through the tragedy of Rubashov's
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The Possessed
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A group of Russian revolutionaries in a provincial town whose anarchic program ends in murder — Dostoevsky is the great predecessor to Conrad in the tradition of the political novel about terrorism and nihilism; The Possessed (also translated as Demons) was published in 1872, thirty-five years before The Secret Agent, and Conrad was almost certainly thinking of it; both are novels that treat revolutionary violence as simultaneously absurd and genuinely dangerous
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