An American critic in "Politics" defines the book as "an ingenious use of Marxism for the arrangement of a detective novel." But Koestler asks us to believe that the tragedy, beneath the veil of fiction, is true. For the fiction is not intended to deceive the reader; the book presents no mythical universe, but deals with prewar Russia, with Stalin, with the Trotskyists brought before the Soviet tribunals.

The first clear fact that emerges is that Koestler, in order to describe the Soviet prisons, which he has never seen, draws on his experience of fascist prisons. Side by side with facts of pure invention, there is a considerable amount of striking documentation, taken from the diary of his term in Franco's gaols (for Koestler's first book on this subject, see Spanish Trstament). His cell, his gaolers, his prison are very real; the prison is that of Seville, the gaolers are Falangists, and Roubachov is Koestler in the hands of the Spanish Fascists.

It is all well done, and seizes the attention. But as the story progresses and the pages are turned, the reader becomes uneasy. The reporter gives way before the political philosopher, whose analyses are very open to question.

In so far as Roubachov is a prisoner, he is human, believable, almost likeable. But Koestler constantly takes him in hand to mould him into a Bolshevik, and then his character has the same relation to that of a revolutionary as Eric von Stroheim in Hollywood has to Germans in Germany.

Roubachov, moreover, no longer believes in the revolution: that is his only crime, for if he sinned, it was by his intentions, never by action.

An American Comment

An impartial observer at the trials in 1938. Joseph E. Davies, then US Ambassador to Moscow, gave his final opinion on them in Mission to Moscow:

All of these trials, purges, and liquidations, which seemed so violent at the time and shocked the world, are now quite clearly a part of a vigorous and determined effort of the Stalin government to protect itself from not only revolution from within but from attack from without. They went to work thoroughly to clean up and clean out all treasonable elements within the country....

There were no Fifth Columnists in Russia in 1941—they had shot them. The purge had cleansed the country and rid it of treason.

It is of course, unnecessary to state that Koestler rejects this intepretation of the facts; but the explanation he presents incarnate in Roubachov, however powerful it is through the veracity of its concrete details, is quite untenable. For the whole novel is based on a masterly piece of prestidigitation. I have read and re-read Darkness at Noon, but I cannot succeed in distinguishing through this would be logical plot the intellectual hinge on which Roubachov hangs his simulation of guilt; except in this, that Roubachov affirms that, for him, the only solution is the denial and suppression of his own convictions since there is no means in existence of bringing them to a successful materialisation. Such an attitude can lead to inertia, to silence, to death, but not to the parade of treason in which he indulges.

There is another phychological gradation in Roubachov's mind which Koestler allows to be half-seen. Despite his pessimism and his fatigue, he nevertheless still believes, imperfectly and despite his "betrayal," in the Revolution for which he has lived. He no longer believes in it enough to live for it, but enough to sacrifice himself to it. He is no longer willing to devote his energies to it; but he is willing to give it his death.

This is all quite false. These are the subtle but exasperated analyses of a sick mind, sick because it has lost touch with the real world, with the living complexity of history. For the terrible weakness of Darkness at Noon is its character of artificial and withered conjecture. The aesthetic and moral condemnation of Koestler's novel is within the book itself. Its relative merit is to make us live with the soul of an artificial being, totally cut off from the world and from other men.