Darkness at Noon -A reveiw of the book by Arthur Koestler

What does a political prisoner contemplate before his execution? In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Rubashov is an incarcerated party member who tries to reason why his communist country is not the Utopia he envisioned and fought for. The book begins with his arrest, and moves through several hearings where he confesses to fabricated charges, before culminating with his pre-determined trial and execution. The plot is simple and bleak but serves to provide a context for Koestler to discuss his ideas. I could see into the mind of the author through the mind of Rubishov. I listened in on his mental monologues, and was drawn into his interrogations, asking myself the questions which he tries to answer.

Rubishov has lived according to the Party policy that the ends justify the means. He presumes that in the future people will look back and realise that the Party’s brutal methods were necessary and good in light of their final utopian outcome. History will absolve all. But Rubishov remembers people he has betrayed because of Party orders, and his conscience is uneasy. Observing the wretched condition of his country, he begins to wonder whether the present really is only an unpleasant step towards a wonderful future, and not the result of an error in the Party’s political theory.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that in nearly a century since the Russian Revolution, history has still not absolved the crimes of communist leaders. Their means did not bring them to the ends they looked for; Communism fell, leaving Russia is a corrupt country, where a few rich Oligarchs live in luxury while the majority of people are poorer than Petrograd is cold. There is no utopia to prove the communists were right, so we must conclude that they were wrong.

So what was the error in communist thinking that led to the problems in Rubishov’s country? Rubishov believes he has found the answer when he discovers an entity within himself, described as the person to whom his mental monologues are addressed. He christens the entity ‘The Grammatical Fiction’ by which he means ‘I’. It is his Self. The grammatical fiction begins where his logical thinking ends. It narrates his daydreams, and triggers his memory at a particular scent or sight. Unlike Rubishov’s intellectual consciousness, it has moral qualms and is afraid of death. It draws conclusions that fall apart under cold reason, but it will not either defend them with logical argument or give them up.

Rubishov theorizes that communism failed because it fundamentally denied the individual by defining each person mathematically as ‘The sum of one million divided by one million’. He argues that communist theory is excellent rationally, but it ignores the irrational part of a person’s consciousness. If it could include Self in its equation, perhaps even find a greater communal self, then communism would be the greatest political system in existence.

I think that Koestler was right, but only in part. The denial of individuality was merely a dreadful symptom of a greater problem. The root of that problem was that Communism was founded on the wrong precepts. Communist theory was like a man who has made a mistake in his accounting; he left out an entry in his debit column, and no matter how many times he checks his equations, his cashbook will not balance. Communist thinkers left out God and the truth He placed in the bible, choosing instead to base their calculations on the lies of Atheism and Humanism. They tried to reach Heaven without God, and failed. Even if they were to include ‘the Grammatical Fiction’ in their philosophy, it would still eventually go wrong, because until communist precepts are revaluated according to a scriptural perspective, they will continue to fail.

I enjoyed Darkness at Noon because it made me think, but I am not convinced by its core idea. Keostler is writing as a disillusioned intellectual who cannot provide answers. He cannot understand why things went wrong because he does not know God and therefore he has the wrong preconceptions of history and man. He still clings to the wreckage of his former socialism but, like Rubishov, is old and worn out.