Behind the facade of a Soho shop selling dubious merchandise lives Verloc with his wife Winnie, her mother and her retarded brother, Stevie. Verloc is an overweight, indolent anarchist who conceals his political activities, such as they are, under a veneer of domesticity and family life.
According to the First Secretary, Mr Vladimir, Verloc has done little to earn his money in recent years and it is time for a “dynamic outrage” to provoke the middle classes. So Verloc, accepting his duty, plants a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory. But when the blast has done its work, Verloc finds he has destroyed a great deal more than the complacency of the bourgeosie.
The Secret Agent is arguably one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Its brilliant depiction of a terrorist underworld, its ruthless irony and its black satire on a morally corrupt society is the culmination of many influences on Conrad, including that of Dickens and Dostoyevsky.