I don’t know why Heart of Darkness receives so much attention among the works of Joseph Conrad. Perhaps it taps the angst of grad students and professors in their quests for titles and tenure. 
I find it unfortunate, as Conrad has much else to offer and some of his works are more accessible and … less dreary than Heart of Darkness.
Earlier this year I read The Rover (in a very fine, calf-skin edition from 1924), and I’d previously read Victory and a number of Conrad’s shorter works. A few weeks back I stumbled across The Secret Agent in Port Orchard’s Book ‘Em. (Interestingly it was published in Stuttgart and labeled “Not for sale in the U.S.A. or the British Commonwealth.”) According to Conrad’s introduction, the plot is ripped from a headline in the same loose sense as NBC’s Law & Order. In Conrad’s work, the missteps of an agent provocateur gradually expose a tableau of London revolutionaries whose ideologies either render them inert, inhuman, or, at the very best, awash in hypocrisy.
His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him.
For an exploration of the hollow core of radical Marxism and Historicism, The Secret Agent offers all that within an espionage tale and with a bit of humor as well.
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