Rating: 
Summary: How dark can it be that one may still see the light?
Review: This chilling yet epic novel is a true testament to what literature can be. It expresses both brilliant insites into the haunts of totallitarian regeims and the triumph, or what of it does and/or can develop, behind the gloomy curtain of opressive post-Stalin Russia. It is a must read, a genuine classic that can't be missed in the scale of the universe
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the most compelling study of totalitarianism ever.
Review: Koestler's "Darkness at Noon", published in 1940, is among
the greatest studies of the totalitarian mindset in the
history of modern literature. Indeed, George Orwell used
this work as the principal inspiration for his "1984".
Darkness at Noon is regarded by many as a superior work,
focussing upon the psychology of a senior revolutionary,
arrested by his party for crimes against the state of which
he has no knowledge. He faces the dilemma of exposing the
debasement of the revolutionary ideal his arrest entails, or
supporting his arrest in the belief that it can only serve
to further the cause of the revolution itself. To this day,
"Darkness at Noon" remains the most significant analysis of
the psychology of the victim, as evinced by Stalin's Mock
Trials of the 1930s.
Thoroughly compelling and well recommended reading.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing anti-totalitarian manifesto
Review: Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" is a manifesto decrying the totalitarian tactics of the Soviet Union during the 1930's. A political prisoner himself, Koestler had a lot to say about the treatment of those who were considered threats to the Communist ideal. Although Koestler does not name the Party or the associated countries, the implications are obvious, including the identity of the Party's leader, who is known simply by the name "No. 1."The novel concerns a fifty-ish man named Rubashov, a high-ranking Party official, who is imprisoned for suspected acts of dissension against the Party. Placed in a lonely cell, he communicates with the occupant of the neighboring cell by tapping on the interposing wall. He finds that his anonymous neighbor holds a grudge against him for reasons he refuses to reveal. The prison is filled with people considered "enemies" of the Party, victims of snitching and backstabbing from various levels of bureaucracy. An old friend and battalion commander of Rubashov's, named Ivanov, turns out to be his primary inquisitor. Rubashov and Ivanov have long discussions about the ideals of the Party and how Rubashov is losing faith in a system he once fought so vehemently to establish. The Party's ideals were noble in the beginning, but it gradually became inefficient and underhanded. During his imprisonment, Rubashov recalls Arlova, a secretary with whom he had an affair, who was fired from her job and sentenced to death for suspected political dissension. Rubashov had the chance to save her by testifying in her defense, but doing so could have damaged his own career. When Ivanov shows some sympathy for Rubashov, he is "removed" and replaced with a stricter interrogator named Gletkin, who uses draconian tactics to wear Rubashov down to the point of confession. Rubashov is accused of various attempted acts of governmental sabotage, including a planned assassination of No. 1. The reader sees that it is not relevant to his "trial" whether or not he actually committed these crimes; they are merely trying to get rid of those who threaten the stability of the Party. Koestler demonstrates how the creation of the Soviet Union formed a nation of political prisoners. These are the problems of a government that is concerned more with theory than with practice; that is concerned more with ideals than with individuals.
Rating:
Summary: A MUST READ in today's Pentagon!
Review: I remember reading this in high school and being surprised by how much I liked it even though it was forced on me in a class called "Future." How ironic, considering the book is really about the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It didn't dawn on me until recently how appropriate this book was for that class in the light of the military detentions and prison scandals. Only this time, it's the U.S. behind the torture. Read it. Koestler did a great job. He has written a page turner that makes you think, a novel of ideas that's also a thriller. And despite its historical background, it has much to say about today's world.
Rating: 
Summary: Very, very dark
Review: Nicholas Rubashov is a Communist Party official living under the Stalinist regime. Rubashov may be considered an enlightened individual--he keeps a diary of philosophical musings of a more egalitarian Soviet Union. In his diary and in his conversations, Rubashov criticizes the current (1930's) tyrannical system of ill-humored, uniformly thinking, Neanderthals. Rubashov compares them to the more idealistic men who were the founding fathers of the Revolution. Rubashov is eventually arrested for counter-revolutionary activities and for an alleged conspiracy against the No. 1 Party Leader. Under the Stalinist system it was not unusual for friends and colleagues to act as witnesses against one another. Rubashov, himself, had previously testified against his beloved secretary to save his skin.
_Darkness at Noon_ is about the forces of light and reform against the forces of darkness, those who would eliminate anyone who dares even mildly to criticize the Soviet dictatorship and enforced homogeneity. Under Stalin, just thinking independently or being involved in a minor industrial accident were punishable by death. Occasionally a little too polemical for my taste, _Darkness at Noon_ is, nevertheless, extremely intense and disturbing, especially in its images of Rubashov being interrogated under conditions of intense lighting and severe sleep deprivation. Rubashov, ever the humanist, dreamt of a Russia that "will teach that the tenet is wrong which says a man is the quotient of one million divided by one million."
Rating:
Summary: An anti- Communist classic
Review: This is by far the best book Koestler ever wrote. It is one of the best books ever written about the Soviet mind. The imprisonment of the former high official Rubashov, and his meditation on what he has done in his life, and what is happening to him is convincing and frightening. He has betrayed friends and those loyal to him for the society that is now betraying him. Through a long process of reasoning he comes to the conclusion that his life and the truth too must be sacrificed for the Good of the Society. Koestler thus shows how the total enslavement to the Collective Ideal leads to the loss of the individual's humanity. In telling this story he was criticizing Stalin's Soviet Union the largest prison Mankind has ever known. It would take a far greater writer than Koestler Solzhenitzyn to flesh out the details, and give in a more powerful and painful the story of that Gulag Archipelag that vast planet of Collective Subjugation of the individual which Koestler has convincingly condemned here.
Rating:
Summary: The Grammatical Fiction
Review: You often hear of Communism that the ideals are great, it is only the execution that leaves much to be desired. It is the people who corrupt the system that are the flaw. However, in "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler makes the point that it is a fundamental flaw in the logic and philosophy of Communism that leads to its fall. In the novel, Rubashov plays the part of Trotsky (though not perfectly) and Number One can only be Stalin.
Rubashov is the idealist on whose back and through whose blood Communism is able to succeed. He believes in its ultimate good so wholeheartedly, that he believes the end justifies the mean. Here is where there is a problem. Rubashov is arrested. He is the last of the "old guard" still alive. Number One has had the rest killed. Sure, Number One is the dictator who is consolidating power and eliminating potential rivals. Yet Koestler shows that it isn't even Number One's greed for power that is the true downfall of Communism. It is that any logic with the notion that the means justifies the end will ultimately fail.
Rubashov is captured. "The Grammatical Fiction" of "I," that of rights and fair treatment, begins to speak to him that maybe the means do not always justify the ends. Has he known it all along? Was he really the idealist he made himself out to be? Ultimately, he is unable to break from his old habits and he gives in willingly to serve the state that he still believes in, regarless of the fact that it is killing him needlessly and he knows it. The forces he has helped to set in motion are too strong and he's too old to change his ways.
I'm inclined to say this is a better, deeper, and more intuitive indictment of communism than one will find in any other fiction of the era, especially the highly biased, though immensely entertaining, "Animal Farm." Koestler was a long-time communist before finally realizing its flaws. It is truly a great book, though it probably wouldn't interest the mainstream reader.
Rating:
Summary: When does the end justify the means?
Review: "The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it. But WHO will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution... Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means." -- from the diary of N.S. Rubashov in "Darkness at Noon"
V.S Rubashov is the fictional protagonist of Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon." He is a high-ranking official in a Marxist totalitarian state based on the real-life Soviet Union under Stalin. The book begins with Rubashov being imprisoned in one of the dungeons of the Communist system he helped create. Rubashov was a top member of the Party from the beginning of the Revolution and a close associate of the leader, "No. 1" as he's called by his subjects, but just like in so many Communist states of the 20th Century, the machine that Rubashov helped set in motion eventually steamrolled over most of its makers as well.
"Darkness at Noon" is simply brilliant and will be especially interesting for anyone familiar with Stalin's Show Trials of the 1930s (the specific event on which the book is most directly based). The reader is placed in the mind of Rubashov as he debates with himself about whether what he once fully believed (that the Party is justified in whatever it decides) is still true, even if that means his imprisonment and execution. Who decides what is morally wrong, do such concepts as "right" and "wrong" even exist in reality, and what is not permissible in pursuit of the ideal? Alone in his cell, in between his prison interrogations at the hands of lower-ranked products (Ivanov and the even younger and more ruthless Gletkin) of the Communist machine he helped create, Rubashov struggles with these questions. If there is a morality higher than simply what the Party judges to be correct, was his whole life - soon to be ending as he well knows (having been on the executing end of the equation so many times) - lived in testament to a lie? How would one even face such a conclusion other than with complete despair?
A reader sitting far removed from Rubashov's situation might think, "Of course what the Party is doing is wrong. Whatever that may mean about his life, it would be better for Rubashov to face the truth before dying." But why is what the Party doing wrong? Who is anyone else to say? If there is no higher morality, no "God," then what is there but efficiency and power? One might disagree with the EFFICIENCY of the Party's methods, but that is no grounds for disagreement with the Party's MORALITY. For Rubashov to come to a conclusion that what the Party is doing is morally wrong (as opposed to merely inefficient) and therefore choose not to sign his name to a dishonest confession as his tormentors are demanding, he has to have an appeal to an authority greater than the Party. But what in the world would THAT be?
As the interrogator Gletkin puts it, explaining to Rubashov why the end justifies the means: "The bulwark must be held, at any price and with any sacrifice. The leader of the Party recognized this principle with unrivalled clearsightedness, and has consistently applied it... We did not recoil from crushing our own organizations abroad when the interests of the Bastion required it. We did not recoil from co-operation with the police of reactionary countries in order to suppress revolutionary movements which came at the wrong moment. We did not recoil from betraying our friends and compromising with our enemies, in order to preserve the Bastion. That was the task which history had given us, the representative of the first victorious revolution. The short-sighted, the aesthetes, the moralists did not understand. But the leader of the Revolution understood that all depended on one thing: to be the better stayer."
Who is anyone to say that the leader is morally wrong?
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Novel
Review: An excellent portrayal of Stalinist Russia, and the show trials that engulfed many of the original Russian revolutionaries.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, not gripping
Review: Maybe the best aspect of this book is that we root for Rubashov, the former Communist party leader turned denounced "counterrevolutionary", without seeming to realize that he's simply fighting over methods, not beliefs. His trial comes about because he so fervently wants Communism and the inevitable march of HIstory, and is convinced that the current regime has stalled that march; his internal struggle is mostly about coming to grips with being punished for his sincere belief in the same principles that his torturers hold true; his regret in the end is that he can't live to flesh out a new kind of revolutionary theory he begins to hatch in prison. It's only at the very end that he comes around to what most readers think of as "our side", seeing himself as an individual and fully wondering if he hadn't been on the wrong end of the struggle all along.
Other than this twist, though, I wasn't pulled into the book as I thought I would be. The process of breaking down Rubashov is an intellectual one, a slow hammering down of beliefs, and it reads like one: objectively fascinating, but not gripping drama that a Vietnam prison narrative might offer with its physical hardships. It may perhaps be so hard to imagine the kind of rigor of belief that Rubashov holds that it's tough to imagine the strain of having those beliefs suddenly become your death sentence. In the end, it means that the reader is just a bit too distant from the action, and by the time the narrative picks up at the very end, it's too late. Koestler's book is well-written and is a great historical lesson, but still leaves much to be desired.
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