Audiobook · read by volunteers
Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
Read by Hugh McGuire, Neal Foley, fling93, Branko Collin, Greg, Lloyd Davis, Mitchell Dwyer, Michèle Pacey, Gina, Mark Bradford · 13 chapters · 9 h 53
About the book
Adolf Verloc keeps a small, shabby shop in a London back street, sells dubious papers and trinkets, and leads a quiet home life with his wife and her gentle, dependent brother. He also works as a secret agent. When a foreign embassy asks him to provoke an outrage that will frighten the authorities, the shabby routine begins to break apart. Joseph Conrad's novel is a dark, ironic and often very funny study of spies, anarchists, policemen and diplomats, all playing their games in the fog and grime of the city. It is a story of plots and counterplots in which nobody is quite what he seems and the consequences are never what anyone planned. Ten LibriVox readers share the thirteen chapters of this nearly ten-hour recording, which suits a long journey or a series of evenings.
Introduction
Joseph Conrad, who lived from 1857 to 1924, was born in a Polish family in the Russian-ruled part of the old Polish lands and spent many years as a sailor before becoming one of the great English-language novelists. He wrote in a language that was not his first, and his books on the sea, on empire and on political violence have been studied and admired ever since. The Secret Agent was published in 1907 and is set in London in the late nineteenth century.
The novel was based, in part, on an actual event, an attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, and it deals with the shadowy world of political conspiracy with a sharp, ironic eye. Conrad subtitled it a simple tale, and the title is itself an irony: the book is a tangle of motives, self-deception and moral muddle, and its tone moves between grim and comic. The characters are memorable, from the complacent shop-keeper at its centre to the anarchists who surround him and the policeman who investigates, and the city itself, damp and gloomy, plays a part.
Many readers regard it as an early and powerful study of terrorism and of the way that political violence feeds on private weakness. Ten volunteers from LibriVox share this recording, which runs for almost ten hours in thirteen chapters. It is a thoughtful listen for anyone who enjoys intricate plots, sardonic observation and fine prose, and who does not mind being a little uncomfortable by the end. Its portrait of the shadowy world of informers and conspirators continues to feel unnervingly modern, and few novels capture so well the dread of a secret that cannot be undone.
Public domain
Joseph Conrad died in 1924: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text