Archive for July, 2020
A Review of “Darkness at Noon” by Arthur Koestler
Darkness at Noon, A Novel by Arthur Koestler, translated by Daphne Hardy. New York: Scribner, 1941,1968 (272pp.) Read the first time in about 1980 at Oklahoma University, in a class on History of the Soviet Union by Dr. Tobias. Read the second time, 06-07-20 to 07-14-20, because of the Amerikan Communist Revolution that is ongoing. If You want to see what is coming for Amerika, read this book! Arthur Koestler, 1905-1983, was a Hungarian-Jewish author, educated in Vienna who joined the German Communist Party in 1930. His family had supported the Hungarian Bolshevik Revolution in 1919. He became a journalist for a prestigious German magazine in the late 1920’s and his career was off to a good start. In Germany in the early 1930’s he was a member of the Anti-fascist group (the grandparent of today’s Antifa movement). During the Spanish Civil War he acted as a journalist/spy for the Soviet Union until he was found out and had to flee. He returned to Spain in 1937 but was caught again and imprisoned under a death sentence but was eventually set free in a prisoner exchange. By 1939 Koestler was so disappointed in the Marxism of the Soviet Union that he wrote Darkness at Noon. He met Daphne Hardy who translated his novel into English, they fell in love and would get married. Koestler was denied a visa to get into England so he joined the French Foreign Legion, went to North Africa where he went AWOL and made his way to England where he was imprisoned for a while, then rejoined Daphne.
The novel tells the story of an old Bolshevik, Rubashov, a high official in the Soviet government (although the Soviet Union is never mentioned in the novel; neither is Germany, nor Hitler or Stalin- they are referred to obliquely) who helped with the Revolution and the Civil War and in setting up the government for 20 years but is now discarded, arrested, and put on trial. This book is an excellent insider look at the workings of the Communist mind and their warped system of ethics where “the end justifies the means”. While I read this book 40 years ago to learn more about the Soviet Union, I have chosen to re-read it because America is undergoing a Communist Revolution today. As I write, the cities of Seattle and Portland are burning in chaos, Minneapolis is in a shambles, and cities like New York, Atlanta, and Chicago are violent and getting worse. This book is an excellent way to understand the current mindset of the Communist BLM/Antifa revolutionaries. For this reason I have placed this novel in the Church Library, hoping that some of my fellow Christians will read it and learn about the current crisis and how it mirrors the crisis of the early 20th Century. The book is a challenge to read; the first third of the book is slow, detailed, but worth the work. It is a very Dark book as the title suggests. There is a new edition of this book that uses a more complete manuscript and a better English translation by Philip Boehm that I have not seen. There is apparently no English language movie of this novel but there is a Japanese movie based on it. I would dare Hollywood to do a movie that is faithful to the book! This book deserves to be read every bit as much as Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-four and Animal Farm, or as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Our church library has these books and Every church library needs these books and Christians should be reading them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler
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