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."