About fifteen years ago, I remember finding the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels. Immediately, I thought that I would try to read all one hundred. Granted, I was really poor at the time - you know, no television, no money to do anything with friends, no money to buy c.d's(yes, they were around then). This was a free venture that could supply me with hours of entertainment and if I ever did get money and was able to hobnob with educated folks, I would have something to discuss. I haven't read all one hundred yet. Let's just say I became well-acquainted with digression. I did make it to number eight which became a book that haunted until this day. I am afraid it is slipping into obscurity, but it shouldn't. It is a brilliant novel that attacks the idea of any totalitarian regime, any political ideology, that suppresses the needs of the individual to justify the objective of the political party. This objective usually involves heralding the individual above the state, but in the end, it uses the individual for the gain of the party.

In this novel, Rubashov goes through three hearings in the 1930's Soviet Russia for his participation as a key leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. His numbered prisoner 404 and he is in solitary confinement with his only communication being interrogation and communicating with his next door cellmate through Morse code. The novel is extremely rational, used as a device to argue the system of Communism. Interesting that Koestler chose an extreme rational literary style to narrate the novel as if proving that it can't succeed. Through flashbacks we see how he came into his situation, but as we near the end of the book, Rubashov becomes irrational from the psychological abuse.

The hypocrisy of the "system" becomes clearer and more ridiculous as the book progresses, but the kernel of what Koestler is trying to exploit comes from Ivanov, old Bolshevik compatriot and now Rubashov's examining magistrate:

"My point is this," he said; "one may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions. That is the first commandment for us. Sympathy, conscience, disgust, disrepair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one's own navel, to turn up one's eyes and humbly offer the back of one's neck to Gletkin's revolver -- that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton to Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the word, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one's own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears..."

This is the quintessential political theory novel and especially in these times, we sholdn't let it's message slip away from us.

Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
Translated from the German by Daphne Hardy
Scribner
Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4026-7
$14.00