"We brought you the truth, and in our mouths it sounded like a lie. We bring you freedom, and in our hands it looks like a whip. We bring you the living life, and wherever our word resounds trees wither and there is the rustle of shriveled leaves. We proclaim the brightest future, and our proclamations sound like vapid drivel and brutish barking."
Considered a masterpiece of "tragic irony" by The New York Times, "Darkness at Noon" tells the tale of Citizen Rubashov, an accused revolutionary imprisoned for his anti-state activities. During his incarceration, he is led to second-guess the underpinning of his beliefs and question whether it was all worthwhile.
"One hundred fifty years ago, on the day the Bastille was stormed, the Europeans swing once again lurched into motion after a long period of inertia, with a vigorous push away from tyranny toward what seemed an unstoppable climb into the blue sky of freedom. The ascent into the spheres of liberalism and democracy lasted a hundred years. But lo and behold, it gradually began to lose speed as it came closer to the apex, the turning point of its trajectory: then, after a brief stasis, it start moving backward, in an increasingly rapid descent. And with the same vigor as before, it carried its passengers away from freedom and back to tyranny. Whoever kept staring at the sky instead of hanging on to the swing grew dizzy and tumbled out.
"Whoever wishes to avoid getting dizzy must try to grasp the laws of motion governing the swing. Because what we are facing is clearly a pendulum swing of history, from absolutism to democracy, from democracy to absolute dictatorship."
As a new translation of Arthur Koestler's 1941 version, this book can get weighted down by the weighty conversations between Rubashov and his torturers, though there is merit in following the linguistic battles over logic.
The introduction of Orlova as the lone female character provides a blank slate on which Koestler -- and Rubashov -- can do and project as they wish, with a reader potentially wishing that more time could have been spent on her perception of events.
"History had a slow pulse; humans calculated in years while it calculated in generations. Perhaps this was the beginning of the beginning."
At times claustrophobic, at times transportive, "Darkness at Noon" is an essential dissection of Cold War sentiment and a vivid and intriguing look at the lengths men will go to be proven correct.
"Then all was still. The sea rushed on. A wave gently lifted him up. It came from afar and traveled serenely onward, a shrug of infinity."
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