Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is the definitive novel of the so called ‘Midnight of the century’, under the cover of which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided Europe between themselves. Few writers can resist comparing this story of an ill-favoured Soviet comrade’s nightmarish experiences in prison to that other, more GCSE-friendly, anti-totalitarian tract, 1984 (nor, it appears, can I!). Yet the comparison is unfortunately rarely made the other way around. While ownership of Orwell’s novel has become the badge of honour for any 14 year old with radical pretensions, Koestler’s masterpiece is less well known. This is a shame, though a perfectly explicable one. It is easy to sympathise with Winston Smith, Orwell’s hero, because he is an everyman, whose lack of faults is simply part of his lack of a personality. Koestler presents the reader with something more discomforting – a protagonist who has fallen foul of the barbarous regime which he has spent 40 years administering.
The protagonist, Rubashov, garners the reader’s sympathy through being a free thinker in an environment toxic to free thought, increasingly disillusioned with his party’s doctrine, “Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful”, and even more so with their idea of what is useful. Rubashov’s interrogators, like Dostoevsky’s inquisitor, feel that they do not only have to break their victim, but convince him of the wrongness of his heretical opinions. In other words, and in a brilliantly paradoxical fashion, this pair of fervent atheists are intent on saving Rubashov’s soul. This is the most obvious manifestation of Koestler’s comparison of the Party with history’s nastiest incarnations of the clergy – especially the Spanish Inquisition. It is a shrewd move by Koestler, the project of whose novel is to ask why, in the show trials of the 30s, the Soviets were so intent on proving the loyalty of the accused before killing them.
This may not be a novel for 5th week; but it is an excruciatingly believable portrait of a man caught in a battle of ideas he knows will end violently for him. Yet more harrowing is the realisation of how autobiographical the book is. To realise this, we need not know anything about Koestler’s life – that Darkness at Noon is true experience reimagined is made clear through the meticulous writing and lack of melodrama of its author’s portrayal of Rubashov’s trials, both legal and physical.
