Warning: This review contains disturbing content about sexual violence and the Holocaust.
Arthur Koestler, a potted biography
Arthur Koestler was born to a Jewish mother in Budapest, capital of the Hungarian part of the the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1905. So he was 14 when the short-lived Hungarian communist government of Bela Kun seized power in 1919 and Koestler later remembered his teenage high hopes for it and for a better future. The Bela Kun regime was crushed and replaced by the authoritarian rule of Admiral Horthy, but Koestler retained that youthful idealism
Koestler became a journalist and travelled widely in the late 1920s and early 1930s, reporting from the Soviet Union, Palestine and Germany, for a variety of German newspapers. He joined the German Communist Party in 1931.
In 1936, early in the Spanish Civil War, Koestler got access, as an accredited journalist, to General Franco’s headquarters and gathered evidence of the support the regime was getting from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which was published, a great scoop at the time. This and other experiences were incorporated into his book Spanish Testament.
On a second trip in 1937, Koestler was caught in Málaga when it fell to Mussolini’s troops, was arrested, and convicted for spying because of the revelations from the Franco HQ. He was sentenced to death and from February to June 1937 he was imprisoned in Seville under sentence of death.
Quite an experience, which he also wrote about in Dialogue with Death. Eventually he was released in a prisoner exchange for the wife of one of Franco’s favourite flying aces.
Koestler moved to Paris where in 1938 he completed The Gladiators, a novel about the rising of ancient Roman slaves under Spartacus. The same year he quit the Communist Party and began writing the novel he’s most famous for, Darkness at Noon. His then girlfriend, English sculptor Daphne Hardy, translated Darkness at Noon from German into English and smuggled it out of France when she left ahead of the German occupation (June 1940).
Koestler’s life story is extremely colourful. First he was arrested by the French authorities in late 1939 and held in a French internment camp as an enemy alien. He described this experience in the hastily written memoir Scum of the Earth. He was eventually released at the request of the British authorities and as the result of intense lobbying by Hardy.
But how to get out of France without official papers, which the sclerotic French bureaucracy wouldn’t give him because he was ‘an enemy alien’? Koestler came up with a mad scheme. On the very day the French surrendered to the invading Germans, in May 1940, Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion in a desperate expedient to get out of the country.
He was accepted, trained and packed off to North Africa where he promptly deserted, made his way to Lisbon and so by boat to Britain. However, because he arrived without an entry permit, Koestler was again imprisoned.
Surely the only major writer to have been imprisoned in three different countries.
Koestler was still in prison when Daphne Hardy’s English translation of Darkness at Noon was published in Britain in early 1941 to great acclaim. This, and influential friends, helped get Koestler released from prison and he immediately volunteered to fight for the British Army, serving 12 months in the Pioneer Corps.
In March 1942 Koestler was assigned to the Ministry of Information, where he worked as a scriptwriter for propaganda broadcasts and films. During his spare time he wrote Arrival and Departure, the third in what had now become a trilogy of ‘political’ novels that began with The Gladiators and continued with Darkness at Noon.
Arrival and Departure
Although Darkness at Noon is transparently about the grotesque show trials which Stalin organised in the Soviet Union to discredit and liquidate all the old Bolshevik leaders who could be a threat to him, a striking feature of the book is that it nowhere actually mentions Russia, the Soviet Union or Stalin, preferring to use generic terms such as ‘the Party’ or ‘Number One’.
Clearly, Koestler felt there was value in trying to generalise the experience he was describing. Presumably the same wish not to be tied down by details and specifics underlies his approach in Arrival and Departure which continues to use some of the same generic terms.
Arrival and Departure is arranged in five parts which also bear very general titles.
Part 1: Arrival
The book opens mysteriously with an unnamed male protagonist leaping from the deck of a ship carrying a waterproof bundle. He swims to the anchor chain of the large ship, a cargo ship, the Speranza, which he’s been stowing away in while he orientates himself. He’s been hiding in the cargo hold for fifteen long days and nights. Now he can see a shoreline not too far away and swims towards it, eventually hitting the sloping shoreline and walking up through the waves onto the beach. He hides in one of the long row of bathing huts. His nose has been broken, his two front teeth smashed. His body has cigarette burns at various places (we later learn there are three: on one heel, behind one knee and on his penis), the result of torture. He is 22.
On the beach were sandcastles made by children. One of them carried a little toy flag, the flag of ‘Neutralia’ – so that’s where he is. Hidden in the beach cabin he weeps with relief.
Next day, things feel very relaxed. His clothes have dried overnight, it is very bright and sunny, he walks into town along a road lined with palms, there’s a square, he manages to change some of the money he had in his bundle, sits at a cafe table and orders a slap-up breakfast.
A family sitting nearby recognise him. They’re waiting to get visas to move on. So are friends. They tell him where the consulate is. As he walks on people recognise him. We learn from a woman in a queue that his name is Peter Slavek, he was a leading figure in the Party, and was arrested. Her husband mutters it’s best not to remember anything. Nonetheless the woman remembers that ‘they’ broke his nose, smashed his teeth out and extinguished cigarettes on his body. ‘He was the hero of our generation’.
Another woman, Dr Sonia Bolgar, watches Peter pass. She tells her companion Peter’s mother was a friend of hers. She thought ‘they’ had shot him. She says an accident happened in his family when the boy was just five and he has blamed himself ever since. He was a star student at the university, joined the party and was arrested a couple of times.
The combination of extreme heat (‘blazing street’, ‘hard glare’, ‘the sun was like a furnace’) and tropical fruit in the market stalls Peter passes made me wonder if it’s set in a North African colony. The waiter and others speak French, so a French colony – Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria.
Peter walks to the consulate and tries to persuade the officials that he wants to enlist in their army. Their country is at war. The official (incongruously named Mr, not Monsieur, Wilson) accepts Peter but shrugs and says it’s for ‘the authorities at home’ to decide. The problem is Peter comes from a nation which is an ally of the country the country he’s in is fighting. (Hungary? Allied with Nazi Germany? against France?) Mr Wilson says he’ll see what he can do but off the record suggests he tries the American consulate.
He sees Nazi posters in the shops but, in line with the ‘allegorical’ approach, the posters which describe a New Europe dominated by a newly arisen Central Power, under its stern-faced leader – neither the country nor leader are actually named. Walking on Peter comes to another shop window which shows photos of the New Nation’s opponents, led by their king and a cabinet minister in a bowler hat who flashes a V sign.
Peter bumps into the couple who discussed him earlier. He refers to the man as Comrade Thomas. They were both once part of the Movement. But the Movement has tacked and veered and changed directions so many times it has strangled itself. Presumably he is talking about the Soviet Union and the staggering impact it had on communists around the world when Stalin abruptly announced the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939.
He had thought it would be so easy. Stowaway. Get to a safe destination. Find the consulate. Volunteer for their army. Be greeted with open arms, taken right in, given somewhere to sleep and papers. But no. None of that. He’s out walking the blazing hot streets, rejected with officialdom, with nowhere to stay and no papers.
By about this stage I realised it’s Casablanca, Casablanca for intellectuals. There’s an extended community of refugees from all over Europe
Part 2: The Present
Five weeks later, Peter is in the queue at the American consulate. Dr Sonia joins him. He is evidently feverish and weak. She realises he is starving, making one loaf of bread last four days. She takes him back to her flat, feeds and washes him, and he moves in. It isn’t a sexual thing. She is huge (her size is repeatedly emphasised) and was a friend of his mother’s i.e. twice his age.
Sonia is a practising psychotherapist. Half the refugees in town come to her for advice and comfort, even representatives of ‘the other side’. The young woman Odette often comes to visit and the two women make it plain they expect Peter to leave.
Over the coming days Peter slowly falls in love with Odette, well, develops a one-sided obsession with her.
One day she calls round when Sonia is out, one thing leads to another, she gets up to walk out, he slams the door shut, she struggles, he grips her, they stumble to the floor and in a red mist he rapes her. I didn’t see that coming.
Peter doesn’t acknowledge the enormity of what he’s done, he insists that he loves her while the raped woman remains in a foetal position on the sofa facing the wall, crying.
But after a while of Peter pleading, Odette loses her temper and tells him to shut up. He holds her hands and insists that he loves her and after a while she stops crying and start commenting sarcastically on this so-called ‘love’, on men and their brutish ways, how they beat a woman down, bullying and nagging until she eventually says, ‘After all – why not?’ And as he lowers himself towards her again, she says that to him: ‘After all – why not’, indicating her self-abandonment. Athough she adds: ‘But don’t hurt me this time.’
For ten days he lives in a sensual paradise, absolutely head over in heels in love. Every day he spends at Odette’s room in a her boarding house, they have sex, then laze around chatting, then get dressed and go for mussels and local wine at a harbourside restaurant. Paradise. On the tenth day he knocks and immediately sense the flat’s emptiness. Inside it has been stripped bare. A note on the table says she got her visa, had a place booked on a ship and has left.
Part 3: The Past
Peter undergoes a complete nervous collapse. He can’t walk. He has deep dreams and waking hallucinations. Deliriously he thinks he’s flying a fighter plane. He has snapped. Sonia calls Dr Huxter who does a thorough physical. Nothing wrong. It is mental. Huxter describes himself as ‘an old Jew’, ‘a general practitioner of the old school’, and is sceptical of Dr Sonia’s depth therapy methods, in fact he sees her as a huge beast, Leviathan from the Bible, dabbling in arcane and unhealthy powers.
Peter is delirious for three days. When he comes out of it he is very weak. Big Sonia nurses him but also does therapy. In his delirium he repeated a psalm about Jerusalem. Now he remembers an incident from his childhood when the family had a pet rabbit, and he overheard the cook say they were going to eat it, and he decided to save it, and his mother repeated the psalm and the little boy picked up the word Jerusalem and applied it to the rabbit and knew that, so long as he thought about Jerusalem the rabbit would be safe. But one day at the park he saw a little girl his age by the pond and fell in love with her and forgot all about Jerusalem, When he got home hungry he wolfed down the chicken stew and only then did the family cook (it was that kind of bourgeois family) tell him it was rabbit stew. He vomited.
Now he remembers that story.
But much worse follows. Suddenly, from pages 78 to 87 he gives a detailed account of the time he was taken out of prison and sent (by mistake it turns out) on a mixed transport, a long train of cattle trucks which included ‘Useless Jews’, women who’d been selected to become prostitutes for Nazi officers, and gypsies who were going to be sterilised.
Only a few pages ago we were reading about the sensual bliss of being young and in love. Now Koestler delivers a really stomach-churning account of how the journey takes days, each truck too packed for people to sit down, then all treading in each other’s excrement, before they are parked in a siding by a disused quarry and here, his truck load watch the ‘Useless Jews’ be forced along a corridor of guards and up steps into removal-type vans which have airtight doors, and in which the Jews are gassed to death in batches.
It takes all afternoon and long into the night, and in their cattle trucks and then as they are hustled along to the vans, the Jews sing, sing defiantly, a song about the return of the Messiah as they are led to be murdered.
Then the scene switches: Peter describes being caught. He was distributing leaflets for the Movement in a working class area near a mill when cops spotted them and gave chase. His three colleagues fell behind, but Peter made it to the main street, jumped on a tram, switched to a bus, made it home to the apartment where he lived with his poorly mother and the maid, a peasant girl. Later the same day, three detectives arrive. The take the place to pieces, ripping open pillows and cushions and sofas, smashing lamps, breaking chairs, looking for evidence. Then they take him away, handcuffing him and punching him in the face. It was the last time he saw his mother.
Peter explains the arrest was nothing to do with the leafleting. It was because he was on the executive committee of ‘the Movement’ at the university.
He is taken in to be questioned by the legendary interrogator, Raditsch, in his deep-carpeted interview room. Raditsch is a burly peasant who has risen to the top of his career. He disarms Peter by revealing he knows all about his career, and knows the identities of half the members of the Movement, who the authorities are about to arrest. He explains that this country will never go communist because it is a land of peasants. Raditsch understands them, he came from a peasant family.
Worse, Raditsch then proceeds to enumerate the failings of Marxism during which it becomes clear that he knows and understands its theory, history and practice fact better than peter does. Raditsch is familiar with Rosa Luxemberg’s arguments with Bukharin, with the shortcomings of the labour theory of value, he explains to Peter how the theory of working class consciousness is based on an inadequate theory of psychology (p.100).
In other words Raditsch quietly and confidently strips Peter of all his intellectual and organisational protection. Then he gives him thirty seconds to confess, thirty seconds to avoid being taken away and tortured and puts his pocket watch on the table and they both watch the second hand tick round.
At the end of 30 seconds Peter has kept silent and so with a sigh Raditsch orders him to be taken away, down stairs, along a corridor and into a room with six strong men dressed in black who in a friendly ungrudging way proceed to beat him black and blue, breaking his nose, smashing his face, stretching him across a table and whipping him with some metal implement that makes it feel like his body’s been cut in two. He screams, he wets himself, he shits himself, his face is covered in blood and tears and snot, he passes out.
All this is in flashback. Peter pieces together the scene over a series of sessions with Sonia, who sits quietly and rather formally, apparently doing her knitting, only occasionally asking a question to prompt Peter, to help him over a bump in the road.
All kinds of mental images and memories and layers overlap and interpenetrate. For example, Peter explains that despite the most outrageous torture he refuses to ‘confess’ not because of Party discipline, he’s long forgotten the Movement, it’s something deeper, a sense that he has already betrayed the Party with a thousand little mental infidelities and witholdings, which he’s told Sonia about. On page 119 he makes a list for Sonia of all his betrayals, starting with feeling guilty about getting away after the leafleting episode when his three comrades were captured, for breaking his mother’s heart, for being powerless to help the Jews as they walked off to be gassed, working backwards through a long list of excuses for guilt.
Anyway, the text gives a very detailed description of the four days of intense torture, beatings, whippings, waterboarding and bastinado that he received, very detailed and stomach-churning, not for the faint-hearted.
But all this is only really preparatory to Sonia’s psychotherapy. Peter was to emerge as a hero for the Movement, a legend because he didn’t break under torture. But he had nothing to confess because in his heart he had already betrayed everyone. It is the root of this guilt which Sonia is really interested in, she calls it his Christmas tree of guilt on which he has spent his life (he is now 23 years old) hanging all kinds of decorations. Backwards she goes through his memories till we reach the real bedrock.
When he was five he was playing half-maliciously with his younger brother in a disused rowing boat by the sea on a family holiday, when they both tripped and fell forward and his little brother’s eye was impaled on a rusty rowlock, permanently blinding him. But even that isn’t it, because digging deeper we learn that aged just three he remembers reaching into the cot of the little baby, the newcomer who had taken everyone’s love and affection away from him. Not long before a beloved toy of his, a teddy bear, had been taken away supposedly because its eyes had fallen out. Now, aged just three, little Peter thought that if he put the eyes out of the screaming baby it, too, would be taken away and he would be restored to the centre of his mother’s love. He was disturbed in the mere beginnings of the attempt, but the memory of the murderous impulse remained with him, and when the accident in the rowing boat happened he was stricken, because it felt like his murderous wish had come true.
And for the whole of the rest of his life, he had sought pretexts and excuses for blaming himself for everything. Feeling guilty at the way the cops trashed his mother’s apartment, feeling guilty about his comrades being arrested – these are just decorations on the really deep, swarming, brooding feeling of worthlessness and guilt pullulating at the core of his mind. As Dr Sonia says:
‘The hardest sentences are those which people inflict on themselves or imaginary sins.’ (p.97)
Peter’s nightmares disappear. His leg begins to move again. His fever goes. He feels calm and awake. He is cured.
And not only cured of his personal demons. He had joined but then abandoned the Movement, disillusioned, but these complicated personal motivations, the memories, the guilt and the cataclysm of the torture, had kept him tied to it. Now he has exorcised both chains which held him back.
That was over. He was cured; never again would he make a fool of himself. He was cured of his illusions, both about objective aims and subjective motives. The two lines had converged and met. No more debts to pay, no more commands to obey. Let the dead bury their dead. For him, Peter Slavek, the crusade had come to an end. (p.128)
Outside of Freud’s own case studies, I think this is the most extended, detailed and compelling account of a psychotherapeutic cure of neurosis I’ve ever read.
Part 4: The Future
Just as he fell ill, Peter had received a letter to go see Mr Wilson at the Consulate. There he received the papers he needed to apply at the American consulate for permission to emigrate. Now he has been given permission to travel to the United States, and immediately visits a travel agency and books a berth in a ship sailing from Neutralia to the US in three weeks time.
Sonia has left on a boat to the New World. He stays on in her flat. He is in limbo. She has exorcised him of the past, but the new world has yet to begin. This part is made up of scattered scenes set against his mounting anticipation of boarding the precious ship.
By far the most interesting is the long scene (pp.136-151) where ‘Bernard’ drops by to collect some books he’d loaned Sonia. Peter politely lets him in and their conversation immediately turns into a schematic confrontation. Bernard is a Nazi (nobody uses that word, but that’s what he is), a fervent Nazi, a believer that it is Germany’s destiny to carry the next stage of human evolution which will sweep away all traditions, parliaments and liberal notions of individual liberty, it will sweep away old nations and national boundaries and usher in a world built entirely on the rational use of Europe’s resources for a racially purified population.
There’s much more to it than that. Bernard skewers the compromised motives of all the upper-class university-educated liberals who claim to be one of the ‘workers’, while many of those ‘workers’ actually flocked to the Nazi party because they wanted a way out of their proletariat destiny. He accurately describes a lot of revolutionaries as neurotic middle-class mummy’s boys. They argue back and forth about the legacy of the French Revolution. Bernard puts the view that the Thirty Years War set back German nationhood by 150 years, but this means she is coming to the notion of nationhood completely new and unshackled by nineteenth century ideas, free to create a new future for all mankind.
What’s vivid and exciting about this passage is the plausibility of much of what he says – about the bankruptcy of old economic systems, the ineffectiveness of old parliaments, and the vigour of new scientific discoveries and technologies, not least genetics and selective breeding. If of plants, why not of humans? And when he goes on to explain how similar the Soviet Union is to Nazi Germany, particularly in their totalitarian systems designed to crush individual liberty in the name of a greater social good, Peter is uncomfortably aware of the similarities and overlaps.
There are other short sections. Peter has a drink at a cafe with Mr Taylor from the Consulate who introduces him to ‘Andrew’, a young man who’s been horribly burned flying planes during an early phase of the war, and his face reassembled with skin grafts from other parts of his body, with grotesque results. Worse, Andrew is cynical about people’s motives for fighting. Everyone feels guilty about someone else who is doing more, is closer to the action, is more at risk, he says. Maybe this four-page section is a coda to the de-guilting of Peter during the psychotherapy scenes.
Peter dreams dreams. The book is full of dreams. Before his therapy, they were anxiety dreams and nightmares. During his therapy they are hideously vivid memories of torture, guilt and self-hatred. After his therapy he continues to have them but they are now diffuse and mysterious.
He dreams of reuniting with Odette. Her letter to him, the one explaining that she’d abruptly left with no goodbye, had left it open whether he wanted to follow her, be reunited with her. Now he is obsessing about that possibility, he dreams of her and her naked body.
Cleaning out the drawers on his last few days before leaving he comes across a fragment of letter written from Odette to Sonia which strongly hints that they were lesbian lovers. He’d sort of guessed that from the way he had to leave the flat every time Odette came round but, it exacerbates his uncertainties about leaving (p.166).
Bernard drops by for another brief fascinating exchange in which he makes the telling point that Marxism has preserved the class divisions of the nineteenth century in aspic and brought them into the 20th, where they are utterly irrelevant. His movement on the other hand is more dynamic and fluid. Nobody can deny that large sections of the so-called working classes have gone over wholesale to the fascists while, conversely, a lot of the upper-class intelligentsia have gone over to communism. In short, a class-based analysis is hopelessly out of date for modern conditions. Bernard is badgering him because he wants to recruit him to work for ‘them’ in America. He drops the bombshell that he will be sailing on Peter’s ship (the Leviathan).
On the day of departure Peter arrives early, is checked on board and dismayed to discover how cramped Third Class quarters and the pitiful lower deck promenade. To cover his anxiety he drinks two bottles of wine for lunch and passes out in a deckchair. When he regains consciousness, it is to discover the deck heaving like a Bank Holiday crowd. He looks up just in time to see Bernard walking up the gangplank and waving down at him. He bursts free, goes down to his hot sweaty cabin and feels like throwing up. Through the porthole he sees a former party member, Comrade Thomas and his wife and Ossie (!) the comrade he thought had been caught by the police at the leafleting fiasco.
Suddenly he feels morally sick. He rushes out the cabin, up the crowded staircases, across the deck to the gangplank and, as the final hoots of the enormous funnel sound above him, safe onto shore, runs to the ticket booth (empty) and then runs runs runs back into the city.
He runs all the way to Mr Wilson’s office. The latter is disappointed to see him but not altogether surprised and happens to have a military man visiting. On the spot Peter manages to volunteer to fight, to fight the enemy. He walks back into the city enormously relieved. Sometimes decisions just have to be taken. Maybe he is motivated by romantic idealism. But if, like him, you have seen the Jews being herded towards the gas vans in the name of a shiny new technocratic Europe, then it behoves you to take up arms against it. When he had joined the Movement, he hadn’t been fully aware of his motives, which were largely personal. Now he is aware of his motives, which are just as flawed and personal but it is a fully conscious decision.
Peter has been writing short stories. In the last few days before he’s called up he writes a short story about the Last Judgement. It is a very powerful fable, very impressive. The Last Judgement is the nightly court of the unconscious which we are all called to and to which we must all return every night of our lives.
Part 5: Departure
The novel concludes with a five-page envoi (‘an author’s concluding words’). Peter is driven to an English RAF aerodrome, shown into officers quarters, introduced to his pilot, given a cup of tea. He waits. In the other room the pilots are playing ping-pong. He is being parachuted into enemy territory. He just has time to finish a hurried letter to Odette telling her he will lover her always. then the pilot appears and it is time to go.
Some hours later he jumps out of the plane and into the night just as he did at the start of the novel when he jumped from the deck of the Speranza into the dark, but this time he knows why and is determined to see it through.
Wow. What a brilliant ending.
Style
Koestler the Hungarian has an infinitely clearer, cleaner and more enjoyable prose style than the other two, English novelists from the same period who I’ve been reading, Rex Warner and Edward Upward. He just describes things in cool, clear flowing prose.
Out in the blazing street again, Peter had to narrow his eyes against the impact of the hard glare on walls and pavement. He felt in his breast-pocket for a cigarette and his hand touched the flag in his buttonhole. He automatically put it away in his pocket and strolled slowly uphill through the steep, narrow street towards the main Avenue. (pp.25-26)
This directness and clarity means that when he comes to describe the two really harrowing scenes – the Mixed Transport and gassing of the Jews, and Peter’s torture – he is able to do it with factual, unsentimental phrasing which makes it all the more harrowing, I mean really harrowing.
If you are squeamish you shouldn’t read this book. On day three the torturers tie Peter naked and spread-eagled to a table and then just look at his bruised bleeding broken body.
This silence, fraught with the expectation of the unknown, brought him nearer to breaking down than the physical pain they had inflicted upon him the previous days. Pain had its limits, fear had none. It was all-pervading like a sustained electric shock, it made his bared teeth vibrate although he clenched his jaws to prevent them from clattering. (p.112)
In these scenes you are right there, inside the character’s terrified mind, feeling every new bolt of shattering pain.
And it means that when Koestler discusses ideas, or has Peter and Bernard argue about the historical, philosophical, economic and psychological basis of Nazism, he does it crisply and logically, making the arguments in sharp clear sentences which are readable and powerful to this day.
Science metaphors
Koestler wrote a lot. Trained as a journalist, he churned out words every day and produced a wealth of articles, essays and books. But it’s notable that after Arrival and Departure he more or less abandoned fiction. He wrote memoirs and books against communism and about Zionism and the Jews in Palestine – but most of his later books are about science or pseudo-science, beginning with an account of the astronomy of Kepler and moving on to tackle Lamarckism, psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia. By the time I started reading in the mid-70s a lot of these books had been discredited and Koestler was seen as an eccentric or fringe character.
You can see the scientific side of his mind already at work in his fondness for scientific metaphors throughout Arrival and Departure.
Touched with the magic rod of cause and effect, the actions of men were emptied of their so-called moral contents as a Leyden jar is discharged by the touch of a conductor. (p.116)
[Peter] listened to [Sonia] with eager excitement, as one listens, at the end of a crime-story, to the detective explaining the clues which had been all the time before one’s eyes; and as at last they begin to yield their meaning, one feels a new pattern of understanding emerge, like symmetrical crystals in a liquid solution. (p.120)
He felt the exultation of his early student days, when he suddenly grasped the principle of Kepler’s laws of planetary movement and the chaotic world around him was tamed. (p.126)
His interest in scientific metaphors can be considered just one aspect of Koestler’s obvious quest for a factual, unrhetorical style and approach, for a clear-headed factual approach – one which eventually led him out of fiction altogether.
N.B.
It is interesting that Arrival and Departure keeps faith not only with the ‘allegorical’ method of Darkness at Noon but with some of the same nomenclature. Neither Germany nor Russia nor the Communist party nor the Nazi party nor Hitler or Stalin are mentioned by name. As in Darkness the ruler of the people’s state is referred to simply as ‘Number One’, and Bernard jovially agrees that his own country (the one bent on uniting Europe and cleansing it of the mentally and racially impure i.e. Germany) has its own ‘Number One’.
We all know who he’s referring to but this use of generic terms keeps the story floating just above actual historical reality, giving it an allegorical, generalised power.
Conclusion
Arrival and Departure – with its detailed description of torture, its harrowing account of the murder of the Jews, with its complex treatment of the psychotherapy of the traumatised central character, and the clear and powerful arguments between Bernard and Peter about the merits of communism and fascism – is a far more varied, powerful and intellectually stimulating novel than Darkness At Noon.
Related reviews about totalitarianism
- Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940)
- The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene (1943)
- The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)
- The Reprieve by Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)
- Iron In The Soul by Jean-Paul Sartre (1949)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
Holocaust reviews
- The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw 1939–45 by Władysław Szpilman
- If This Is a Man by Primo Levi (1947)
- This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman by Tadeusz Borowski (1948)
- The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953)
- Night by Elie Wiesel (1960)
- The Truce by Primo Levi (1963)
- The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
- If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi (1982)
- Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi (1986)
- The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi (1988)
- Fatherland by Robert Harris (1992) [I know it’s a novel but at its heart is a harrowing account of a death camp]
Alan Furst’s ‘Night Soldier’ novels
Alan Furst’s ‘Night Soldier’ series of novels are unashamed thrillers, but they are set in the same murky world of spies, and communist and fascist agitators in Eastern and central Europe in the mid and late-1930s which Koestler is depicting, and the best of them (arguably, the first two) capture the mood of paranoia and fear (and brutal violence) which is the subject of Arrival and Departure.
Books & Boots 