Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler comes in at #8 on the Modern Library list of 100 best novels of the 20th century. With such a high placement on the list I put it on my reading list. I had never heard of this book or author previously. This is another one of those books wrestling with big questions. I’m afraid I don’t have too much knowledge of the place and time it deals with. I tried to put what I was reading in context with the little I know about USSR history and don’t know if my ideas about that are valid or not. So without doing any extra research I just dug in and read. I’d say there were many things I didn’t have a frame of reference for but as a story of a man imprisoned for crimes against the state I felt I could get something out of the multiple ideas explored in the narrative.
Rubashov, the central character, has been pretty high up in the power structure of the party, but things have changed and he is imprisoned for plotting the assassination of the more powerful Number 1 (Stalin) above him. Rubashov himself finds the facts are up for debate as to whether he actually did the things he is accused of. He wrestles with many of the beliefs he has held most of his life. He never so much rationalizes his behavior as he tries to decide if it is necessary to rationalize it.
The author uses the basic situation as his chance to espouse his philosophy on the Party. Again none of this is ever explicitly named but we’re talking about communism, although at times it certainly sounds like partisan politics in our republic. “The Party must not join the Moderates. It is they who in all good faith have countless times betrayed the movement, and they will do it again next time, and the time after next. He who compromises with them buries the revolution.” Yeah, compromise is always bad!
Rubashov ruminates on death—people have died “for the party”-- people have been sacrificed, people have been executed, “physically liquidated”, people have gotten in the way, etc. –as he faces his own execution. With one of his interrogators, Ivanov, he engages in a discussion of “Crime and Punishment” (which I’ve read part of, haven’t been able to get through it all but maybe someday!) and the protagonist there, Raskolnikov, tries to make the argument that his life is worth more than the life he has taken (he’s murdered an old woman with an ax for those not familiar with this story). Even if you can buy into his logic, the problem is the old woman’s sister returns to the apartment while he is in the middle of his robbery/murder so he dispatches her too. According to Rubashov “Raskolnikov discovers that twice two are not four when the mathematical units are human beings…” Of course Ivanov disagrees. “Consider a moment what this humanitarian fog-philosophy would lead to, if we were to take it literally; if we were to stick to the precept that the individual is sacrosanct, and that we must not treat human lives according to the rules of arithmetic.” Sounds a lot like the people we “elect” to run things for us. There seems to be no tipping point where the loss of individual lives outweighs the "mission" whatever that may be, no matter what the politicians say.
Anyway, Rubashov does a lot of philosophizing while waiting to be executed. He deals with many heavy subjects and much of this is worth reading and thinking about. He explores a theory about the maturity of the masses that is thought provoking. I wouldn’t call this a great book in the sense that I wanted to know what was going to happen. It’s pretty obvious from the beginning what the outcome is going to be, but Koestler touches on some important issues that everyone could give some thought to.
Next week: We both tackle William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
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