Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler see more by Arthur Koestler Studio Bantam BooksLabel Bantam Books

Closer Look List Price: £4.64 From: Bantam Books From: Bantam Books Salesrank: 195739 Released: 1993-07 You Save: £ (%)! Lowest New Price: Click Here  Pages: 224 Format: Mass Market Paperback Customer Rating: Also Shop International: (Not all items available internationally)          Customer Reviews: Darkness at Noon - Vintage version It's a novel following the character Ruboshov and his imprisonment in an unknown communist country. He was a well known and respected official party member but is held on the belief that he is a traitor. But the book is so much more than that. It could almost be a biography from the way that it is written. It's expertly detailed, obviously drawing from Koestler's own personal experiences. Ruboshov's journey from that of an angry caged old man, to that of one who has come to terms what has to happen, is very enjoyable to read. But it is also quite informative of what life was like in the USSR during Stalin's reign (albeit that's all interpreted!). The only slight problem I had with the book is that all the characters are so logical and unemotional, which leaves you kind of detached from any of their suffering. You can't really connect with them in the way that you could with, say, D-503 in We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. But maybe that is the point? That you're supposed to get the idea that there is a greater good that they're all sacrificing themselves towards, whatever the consequence. They don't see themselves as individuals. It's all about the state as a whole. To (badly) quote one of the statements from the book: there is no 'I', if there are a million people, then the individual is the result of one million divided by one million. Overall, the book is gripping to the end. It's insightful, obviously influential and despite the heavy political ramblings that occur every so often, it is surprisingly easy to read. And it is surprisingly neutral in that it never condemns nor condones the regime. I thought it would be heavily leaden with detest for the communists, but nope. It was pleasantly middle ground! gripping book with logical fatalism of totalitarian regimes This relatively short book portraying the rather stark and torrid life of a suspected political deviant under Stalinism. It is a thoughtful book - gritty in it's portrayal and although with some rather cynical humour, shows the gradual destruction of intelligence and indeed the will to live through sleep depravation etc. I liked the book as it was insightful and honest.. Not pretty and indeed although with many flashbacks did not really fill out the characters in great detail, concentrating more on the situation. I would definately recommend reading it and as I understand it, it is a very genuine portrayal of life during Stalin's regime. THE NADIR OF SOCIALISM There is no need to spend too great a degree of sympathy on Comrade Rubashov, one of the high-ups of the old guard of the early communist revolution that created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1917. He has fallen from grace and is in prison, apparently no-one is really sure what he has done. Maybe it is just thought crime. He remembers the old days when it was not treason to even use the terms of the church like `sin'. And the fact is, his sins have found him out. Religious elements and moral questions salt the whole story, as he languishes in prison, contemplating his unpleasant fate. He knows the whole routine: interrogation, grinding the prisoner down, the obligatory confession - one way or another - the sleepless nights in the cell, and the final rendezvous with a bullet. There is no surprise in these things, for the reader or for him, it is all clearly indicated from the first page of the story. He is an official of the official list, a nomenklatura, he knows how it goes. The party cannot make errors, so it must be him who made the error. The story is set in the years just before World War II, and the consolidation of Number 1's [Stalin's] power, by regular removal of those who could threaten him by being too powerful or too popular, is the backdrop of the story. [The culling of the Moscow elite and the most powerful of the army commanders was a large part of what kept him in power for so long.] But this scenario is kept far in the background as the closeness of the atmosphere, the interior ruminations of the prisoners, and the sharp, hard delineations of the characters and the grim, grey surroundings of the prison in a grim, grey society is the overwhelming method of the story. It bears comparison with the novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn `A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch', the unlucky artisan who is sent to the Siberian gulag to work as slave labour, unless of course, he freezes to death first. The similarity in the sharp detail of the scene, the exactness of expression without elaborate vocabulary, and the interiorness of the story-telling are all there. There are no doubt very many other comparisons to be made to this story, but one more vivid one which will bear insertion here, is the excellent recent film `The Lives of Others' [`Das Leben Der Anderen' in German], about the socialist paradise of East Germany set just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many scenes are worth comment in this short novel, based as it is on the disillusioned experience of Koestler himself, an ex-communist, who lived this period and knew several powerful men in the USSR who suffered in this way. For me, one stands out, and it echoes a scene in the film `The Lives of Others' where the chief interrogator, who is a trainer of interrogators, explains in a lecture how to tell if a suspect is lying. The parallel in 'Darkness at Noon', is the scene where Ivanov and Gletkin, both of Rubashov's interrogators, are talking in the canteen after dinner, discussing how best to make him confess quickly. Gletkin recounts how he learned that the very early days of the revolution, full of ideals about interrogation by sweet reason and strictly no unpleasantness by methods of torture: it was party rules that the method would be explaining to the prisoner how he or she had failed by new revolutionary standards - they merely had to correct their attitude, and correct behaviour would surely follow. The foolishness of this was to founder on the weakest of the unlucky victims of interrogation, a peasant. When a kulak [peasant farmer] had hidden his crops and money so the robbing officials of Moscow could not simply take it from him to feed the masses in the cities, he had explained it to him, by the party rules of interrogation, that it was now right not to be so selfish as to wish to retain his own rightful private property, but to share it willingly for no payment. The peasant, finding that he was not being beaten as he feared, simply went deaf and ignored the silly witterings of the hapless Gletkin. But, by luck - good or bad, depending whose view you took - once a prisoner was woken at two o'clock in the morning and, being `drunk with sleep and frightened; he betrayed himself.' People were kept standing for hours on end, waiting for interrogation, which was of course from then, mainly at night. Breaking the party rules would be explained as mere sloppy procedure and mistakes on the minions of the interrogator. But confessions were got, as required, so no questions were asked. So, `The regulations were observed; not a prisoner was actually touched. But it happened that they had to witness - so to speak accidentally - the execution of their fellow prisoners.' And so the moral corruption of the whole socialist fantasy slid ever further downward until its bitter end, seventy years after it began in 1917. It is hard to find a difference between the fiction and fact in these cases, they do seem to be one and the same. And still `communism', has a bad name, but `socialism' is somehow `good'! But they gave the game away long ago by calling themselves the `Union of Soviet Socialist Republics', the USSR - strange how people learn to read over an acronym. That is why we need Arthur Koestler, who himself witnessed the Darkness at Noon. Everything you'd expect of Koestler The book is a masterpiece - one of the few authors who manages to so plastically portray the mindset of the pre WW2 years - in this case one of the Communist party. It puts both the brutality of the regime, as well as the complicity of many of its victims into perspective, without either condoning, or demonising it. The book has clearly been written by a master of intellect, writing, as well as someone who has, like Koestler gone through all the phases of infatuation with and then later understanding of the ideology. I have never before read such a logical description of how a completely moral and intelligent individual could justify the participation in the Stalinist (I assume the same holds for other dictatorships of the time) regime, right till the bitter end of their own downfall. Another book which I found similarly haunting was Anthills of the Savannah (Penguin Modern Classics) by Chinua Achebe, possibly one of the best comparisons. Still readable at 3 o'clock Totalitarianism isn't as scary or fascinating as it used to be. With the Cold War over, the horrors of the twentieth century receding, the selection has begun among novels that treat of it. Not all will survive; my feeling, for instance, is that Nabokov's Bend Sinister isn't a masterpiece after all. But Darkness at Noon will make it. The novel begins slowly and somewhat conventionally; in fact, the first few chapters prompted me to the interrogations above. Rubashov has been arrested, even though he is a hero and a party cadre (in all but name, the setting is Stalinist Russia); he is in jail, and it looks as though he is about to be tortured. But Koestler's novel is a political book much more than a treatise about concentration camps or institutional violence. The real struggle takes place within the protagonist's conscience. And we are skilfully, compulsively drawn in. Koestler's strength is that he is able to voice the Party argument cogently, even convincingly. The debate is real; this is not the trite denunciation we might expect. The ideological dilemma, increasingly hard to appreciate with distance, becomes clear again. If one criticism can be made, it is that Darkness at Noon only denounces left-wing totalitarianism as perversion, not as project. But Koestler was a member of the Communist Party; he fought in Spain and indeed was captured by the Franquists. Like Orwell, he was later disabused. His credibility is immense. And what is perhaps most amazing is that this was written in 1940, when Stalinism remained hugely popular. Whether as historical refresher or simply as an absorbing book about conscience, morality, and choice, Darkness at Noon demands to be read. Related Categories: >> >>Books >>Subjects >>Fiction >>Authors, A-Z >>K >>Koestler, Arthur