One of the first reviews of The Secret Agent was in "Country Life" magazine in September 1907. Although
Conrad was dissatisfied with the negative response of the review as a whole, he was nonetheless impressed
when they recognised his debt to the French novelist Zola's employment of irony:
"In portraying him [Verloc]
the author appears to have taken M. Zola as a model, for he introduces him with a certain kind of
respectability, making him decent in his indecency, and honest in his dishonesty."
Irony is indeed all-
pervasive in the novel. The title itself is tongue-in-cheek, as Alan Hunter recognises when he says that
we expect the eponymous secret agent to be a James Bond figure but in the tradition of bathos Conrad
gives us an indolent and incompetent character. F. R. Leavis describes the targets of Conrad's cynicism
as follows: "His irony bears on the egocentric naiveties of moral conviction, the conventionality of conventional
moral attitudes, and the obtuse assurance with which habit and self-interest assert absolute rights and
wrongs."