The Secret AgentIts genesis a real attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894, Conrads novel offers an ironic meditation not only on anarchy and revolution, with all the deception and intrigue they imply, but also on loyalty to friends and family, to country and ideals. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic to terror, too, perhaps.