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Summary: Actually, Clinton makes a good Rubashov . . .
Review: . . . up to a point. Like Clinton, Rubashov persecuted his enemies ruthlessly and systematically, using the oppressive machinery of the state. Like Clinton, Rubashov abused his authority over underlings for sexual satisfaction. Like Clinton, Rubashov sacrificed others for his own comfort and political goals. Like Clinton, Rubashov was dedicated to a totalitarian ideal to the exclusion of the humane. Like Clinton, Rubashov flirted with betrayal of his country for personal gain.However, Rubashov and Clinton differ in important ways. In his youthful years, Clinton never put himself in harm's way to advance his idealism. Clinton never confessed to his crimes. Clinton has not yet realized the error of a political philosophy that aggrandizes the state in the name of the people. Clinton still has his faithful, Flavor-Aid-drinking cadres to back him up. Clinton has not yet perceived the cosmic justice of his legal predicament. And Clinton has never given up on revenge.
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Summary: A Powerful Work
Review: This is a powerful work of fiction which is mostly fact in its nature. It is the story of Communism and the men who made it. It is also an examination of a man caught in a trap which he himself created. Rubachev, facing death at the hands of the party and system which he was instrumental in creating, is forced to look back at his own treatment of others in the same system. The protagonist never seems to be able to come to an understanding of what is right. His last thoughts are not that the intellectual basis of his belief system was utterly corrupt, rather it s that he would rather have studied astronomy. This book is necessary reading if one wishes to understand the totalitarian mind.
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Summary: a heartrending indictment of logical extremism
Review: This amazing novel, written at the end of the 1930's, follows the arrest, questioning and trial of a senior official subject to one of Stalin's purges. The narrative follows an extended dialog both within the subject and between him and his captors as to the very definition of right and wrong, one that is incomparably foreign to individualistic dogma that has triumphed today. The accused stuggles with his conscience in a society that "defines an individual as a multitude of one million divided by one million" and is finally faced with the fact that the logical truths on which he has based fourty years of work are insufficient to describe the human condition. Koestler's masterpeice brings to the reader the full force of logical extremism and reveals the spiritual emptiness of Stalin's soviet union through stark brutality from which the reader is forced to recoil.
Rating:
Summary: Remarkable
Review: Koestler's work can be viewed on several levels as an indictment of totalitarianism, the price paid by those who know too much, and as the sad inevitability endured by paranoia-corrupted power. The pitiful descendence of Rubashov's career reflects the very nature of power which holds immobile philosophy at its core. He and his comrades hold communist philosophy to be the very pinnacle of human thought, and thus find themselves easily persuaded by absurdist arguments which are bolstered by nothing more than carrying errant presuppositions to their logical conclusions. This, perhaps, is one of the major themes of the novel; that holding to rigid logical formulas is akin to building a castle in a swamp - you can keep adding upper floors, but because those already in place are sinking, you'll never make any progress. A second point illuminated upon in this novel is that the rules of the political game will always reflect the interests of those who make them. While this is a standard political science dogma, its truth comes to life through Koestler's work. Being a revolutionary or being a counter-revolutionary is an entirely subjective matter, depending on who is interpreting its meaning - a feature both of this novel, and of all authoritarian states.
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Summary: Raises Unsettling Questions
Review: Now that the Cold War is over and Communism has been destroyed and discredited, it is easier to see that there is more in this book that just a critique of that benighted system, and some of the questions is raises are disturbing even in our age. How did a system with such idealistic aims go so wrong? If it is immoral to jutify the means by the ends, isn't it madness to justify the ends by the means? Most unsettling of all, is it really true that liberal democracy only thrives in the West because our technology is so mature that most of the public understands it? In which case, could the rise of the Internet herald the end of our freedom too? There is much more to this book than a message to vanished communists; it speaks to us too, and therein lies its greatness.
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Summary: Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful
Review: This book is a literary masterpiece. Koestler not only writes well, but his novels explore ideas and makes complex life experiences accessible. Rubashov's experience is the experience of hundreds of millions of people in communist countries. Those of us who have not witnessed a communist revolution in our own countries have a hard time understanding their experience. Darkness at Noon helps us to do that. We cannot say we understand communism without having read this book. Koestler writes in layers. He doesn't waste his words. The story may appear simple, but there is a purpose to the sequence of events and in each of Rubashov's action. Each conversation has a message. This is much more than the story of a man wrongly condemned. We can find that simple plot in Arthur Miller's the Crucible. This story explains how it is possible that people like Rubashov, intelligent and idealistic people, could have lent themselves, heart and soul, to a totalitarian ideology. We learn that communism is a wolf in sheep's clothing. A peddler of impossible dreams. Nearly everyone, including many of its once loyal followers, end up disillusioned. People are betrayed, terrorized, imprisoned, and killed by the system they once supported and helped bring to power. Koestler leaves the reader with the understanding that communism is deadly and evil precisely because it appeals to our idealism and love for others. That it continues to survive through deception, lies, fear, and by creating suspicion, distrust, and paranoia in people. Arthur Koestler was a former communist. This novel is a work of fiction only in its editing and the charachters' names. Rubashov most likely represents Koestler and all the blind idealists who once believed in communism until there was communism. Between Koestler and Soltzhenitsyn, they've left only fools believing in communism.
Rating: 
Summary: A Chilling Tale of Morality
Review: A well-written book which chronicle the last days of an aging revolutionary, Rubashov. The whole novel was set around a prison in which Rubashov was being detained. His crime - the most heinous possible - the betrayal of the revolution. It is obvious, that he was falsely accused (intimations of the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin). In this place, Rubashov began to reminiscene about his past, the betrayals of individuals for the higher cause of the Revolution and the party. In between, we witness his interrogation, first under Ivanov and then under Gletkin. Throughout the interrogation, Rubashov was reminded of the logic of the revolution where the ends justify the means and truth is whatever that is useful at the moment. And in his own particular case, he must be sacrificed for the good of the party and the Revolution. Using the presuasion of this logic, first under the more urbane Ivanov and latter under the more brutal Gletkin, Rubashov who has been wavering in his faith of the party was convinced and hence was "sacrificed" in a kangaroo court. This book examines the totalitarian regime of Stalin with its philosophy of convenience and its consequences. At a more personal level, I found this book a chilling tale of morality when such a philosophy of conveniece is adopted and our humanity is thrown away in the consideration of politics. It is a must-read book to understand the dangers of totalitarian regimes be they of the right or left.
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Summary: The Ends Justify the Means
Review: Political narrative set in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign of terror. The hero is a displaced high ranking member of the Central Committee who is framed for crimes against the State. He plays mind games with his interragators, one of which is an old friend. At the same time the hero reflects upon what his life has come to and the many who he has betrayed in the past. The paranoia of the Soviet regime is portrayed excellently. The tragedy is that it took 75 years for the Russians to realize that the Soviet system did not work.
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Summary: Thought Provoking
Review: There is an ancient Hindu treatise that tells a Ruler how to gain absolute power. Build a castle, it says, of very tough, unbreachable stone. Make the castle impenetrable. The Ruler's room is in the very center, his apartments a raised tower, with bars and the windows so no assasins can get in. He can't really look out, unfortunately, due to the bars. He must select two advisors, of slightly unequal power, with great care. Both of these advisers have troops at their commands. The lesser of the two commanders, The Second Advisor, desperately wants to gain favor in the eye of the Ruler, and become First Adivisor. Thus, Second plots against First, while being loyal to the Ruler. First wants to be Ruler, but is afraid that, if he fails, Second will become either First or Ruler, and he'll end up dead. About the Ruler's chamber are concentric rings of guards. Those nearest the Ruler are the Second Advisor's guards; they are faithful to the Ruler because their commander wants to gain favor with the ruler. The next ring are controled by First, and they are trying to sneak past Second's troops, to get to the Ruler. However, they are held in check by yet another ring of Second's troops, who are inturn surrounded by yet another ring of First's troops... so on and so on, ad infinitum. The mutual distrust spreads throughout the kingdom. First against Second, with the Ruler safe in the web of mistrust he's spun. The only problem is, he's a prisoner in his own castle. This, then, is machiavellian politics, the subject of Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". Objectively, the story deals with Rubashov's imprisonment. On one hand, Rubashov is an inhuman, reasoning monster, killing Arlova, Little Loewy and Richard by ostricizing them from the monolithic "Party". On the other hand, he's a sort of noble figure, dying for his beleifs. Unlike a despot, trying to keep his power, he reasons that the Revolution must go on. It is larger than him. He must sacrifice himself, the good of the many outweighing the good of the one. Oddly heroic, he follows the logic of his life to its pitiful end, his death. "A shrug of eternity." We Americans can easily see this as a send up of Soviet power, but Koestler's ends are, I believe, more ambitious than that. "Darkness at Noon" dissects all political power. Substitute "the church" or "liberty" or "America, right or wrong" for the words "The Party" and "The revolution", and you'll get my drift. Political power is, by it nature, but especially in the 20th and 21st ceneturies, monolithic. Democratic America is not immune to this. Remember McCarthy, the South before Civil Rights, and what good, God fearing Americans did to the Indians. Our hands are not clean. We are perpetrators, too. We are "The Party", as much as the Soviets. Koestler emphasises the universality of his argument by keeping the country's name and #1's name unspoken. This is what makes the book, for me, so chilling. The only way out, as Rubashov sees in the end, is to balance thought with feeling, science with art. To be complete, an individual must attain Freud's 'oceanic feeling' while his feet are firmly rooted. Castles in the air must have foundations on the ground. Only until man is sober enough, is mature enough can such a thing happen. *As an aside, I never heard of this book until Modern Library included it among their "100 best novels of the 20th Century." Problem is, it was translated. Where is Mann, Hesse, Camus and Solzhenitsyn? Perhaps it was because he was a British citizen at the time, and it was originally published in English? I'd like to know. Minor critique of a good list.
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Summary: A chilling story of the darkness of the collective system
Review: This is the book which Communist apologists dread - a chilling and all together dark tale of totalitarian governments in the name of the people. Whether it be Russia of the1930's, China of the late 40's, Cuba in 1959 or Cambodia in the mid 1970's, Koestler succeeds at the depiction of the sacrifice of the individual for the good of "the movement", and the "good of the movement", which is always in the name of "the people". The book also succeeds in depicting the fallacies of the blind following of the all-knowing "Number 1". It is almost a companion piece to anyone reading the Ayn Rand novels "We the Living" or "Atlas Shrugged". All of a sudden, Ms. Rand doesn't sound so far "out there". A terrific book and must read for those who still see any legitimacy in the big red monster.
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