Darkness at Noon (1940)

Although it was taught in my high school and I've heard about it all my life, I'd never read Arthur Koestler's classic of dystopia literature until recently. "Dystopia" might be the wrong word. It's not set in the future and now it seems a little like a relic of the Cold War. In fact, I had it pegged in my mind as a '50s novel, but it was published when Hitler and Stalin were both in power and at war. In many ways it reads like a categorical rejection of communism but I don't think it's exactly that simple. It has more in common with Jim Jones than any of Joseph McCarthy's bogeys, a melancholy study of how ideals metastasize with power and grow mindless and deadly. The narrative arc follows the obtainment of a false confession from a once high-ranking Communist Party official, Rubashov. We hear about little physical torture, but the threat is pervasive. We see more the psychological side, with interview sessions conducted under painfully bright lights all through the day and night. Sleep deprivation is a key point though rarely discussed as such. There are various clumsy points that might be worth acknowledging—hard to believe, for example, that prisoners can communicate so easily and even eloquently with a tapping system through the walls. But what is profoundly believable is the ability of humans to turn true and sincere belief into unanticipated chambers of horror. As a species, are we ever going to figure it out? I despair sometimes. Rubashov may have more perspective on communist ideals as self-delusion, seeing it in his younger comrades as an older man, the generation which followed the Revolution. One of the ways Rubashov justifies his false confession to himself is that it is good for the Party. He knows he has committed his own sins of excess and zeal, and feels he is being punished for them indirectly. He still believes in all the Marxist concepts of history, logic, and inevitability. We know now that the USSR was doomed, even in 1940, to eventually implode into its own oblivion. But I don't think the news would cheer Rubashov. It might make him even more suicidal. It may be hard from the historical context to separate the anticommunist cant from the human tragedy but it's generally worth the effort.

In case it's not at the library.