Martin Jones's Blog, page 8

The Silence Project by Carole Hailey – Writing, Reading and Talking

The Silence Project, Carole Hailey’s 2023 debut novel, is an alternate history, imagining the rise of a cult based around silence.

One day in 2003, Rachel Morris decides to stop talking. Overwhelmed by a feeling that there is too much talking and not enough listening in the world, she moves out of the village pub where she lives with her publican husband, setting up a makeshift camp in the garden. There she stays for years, not saying a word, scribbling her thoughts and instructions in a series of notebooks. Though initially mocked by locals, her actions strike a chord with a lot of people, to the extent that she gains a huge, global following, called The Community. Tragically in 2011, Rachel, and thousands of her followers, burn themselves to death as a final protest against heartless lack of listening. Traumatised by this event, Rachel’s daughter Emilia, finds herself in the sort of isolated position that often makes people vulnerable to the lure of cults. She starts work for The Community, but after a relatively enthusiastic start, finds disillusionment setting in. Emilia eventually decides to write a book, based on her mother’s notes, which she hopes will counter the lies and distortions that an increasingly extremist Community leadership has created around her mother’s image.

So, what to make of it? Personally, I wondered if the book was about writing. It is only when Rachel stops talking that she starts writing. Reading and writing, in contrast to speech, tend to encourage revision, second thoughts, re-readings, re-writings. Writing offers a grounding reference to which we are able to return. This can be useful when people start making stuff up about the past to suit themselves, as The Community leadership is prone to do.

I don’t often get the chance to discuss my thoughts about a book with its author, but in this case the opportunity did arise. In October 2023, Carole Hailey gave a talk at Maidstone’s inaugural literary festival. During questions at the end, I asked if the book was about writing. The answer was ‘no’. But it was a friendly no, mentioning Ray Bradbury, who apparently stormed out of an event when confronted with a student who suggested an interpretation of Fahrenheit 451 that Bradbury did not intend. Carole said she would not storm out. A book takes on an independent life once published, and she was pleased readers were considering it in their own way.

For a few days afterwards I mulled this over. Had I not ‘heard’ the book clearly enough? Had I failed to put aside my own preconceptions? Well, yes. On the other hand, a good novel often invites readers to find something of themselves in the writing. And even if Carole Hailey had not intended reflections on the nature of writing in her book, I would say it still invites them.

During her talk, Carole mentioned Donald Trump as someone who speaks but does not listen. I would also add that Trump famously never reads. And apart from social media posts, he only writes via brow-beaten ghost writers – such as Tony Schwartz, who noted never seeing a single book in Trump’s office or apartment during a year and a half of working on ‘The Art of the Deal’. Compare this with Barack Obama, a famously avid reader and writer. Maybe all of our leaders should both read and write extensively.

For me The Silence Project can be a name for the quiet act of reading and writing. It might all seem to be a one way street with a book, the writer talking and a silent reader listening, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. After all in reading The Silence Project I sort of wrote my own version, in conversation with its author. In the end the best compromise between talking over someone and silence, is conversation.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce – A Review Lacking Conviction

Published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, charting the development of Stephen Daedalus, an able and artistic boy living in early twentieth century Ireland.

Change in the boy’s life mirrors change in the wider world. First we see Stephen as a young child at home with his well-to-do parents, confused at the Christmas dinner table, as family and friends argue about religion and Irish nationalism. Stephen then has a Catholic schooling, where graphic descriptions of hell leave him terrified that his adolescent sexual adventures will consign him to an eternity of fiery punishment. He decides to follow Church rules to the letter, only to grow out of his religious phase, and begin studying science in Dublin. Growing out of science, he has lots of intellectual conversations with other students about definitions of beauty, and decides at the end of the book to leave Ireland and become a poet.

This individual path reflects the world generally, as society moves from faith in religious certainties, to confidence in science, to a modern situation where people are just not so sure of anything anymore.

Does all this make for a good book? Some people think it does. Others disagree, which is quite fitting really.

Personally, I found the book more interesting than enjoyable. During Stephen’s religious period, descriptions of hell’s trials went on for so long, I skimmed a few torments. Sometimes I found Stephen’s intellectual conversations tiresome – a youngster showing off. The portrayal of a student who likes the sound of their own voice was clearly intended – more down to earth fellow students puncturing Steven’s pomposities – but that didn’t make these sections any less wearying to read.

That all said, there were things I enjoyed and admired about the book. Some of the poetic prose was lovely – like memorable lines describing swallows forever working in the eaves of houses to make temporary nests. I was also fascinated by reflections on nationalism. People were busy seeking out clear national identities during Stephen’s young lifetime, maybe as a reaction to a growing loss of religious identity, which had given succour and a sense of belonging for millennia. As an Irish boy, Stephen remarks on expressing himself in English – a language not his own. But like his student mates, he often throws in bits of Latin to conversations, the language of the Roman Catholic Church. This quietly tells us that English people don’t speak a language of their own either. English, like nearly every European language, has a great debt to the ancient language of Italy. For all the sound and fury they generate, national certainties are as shaky as any other. And maybe that’s no bad thing, since rampant nationalism was a major factor in the world war raging as Portrait was published. Loss of dogmatism can make us safer rather than more vulnerable. As Joyce says in one of his most famous poems, ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.

So, I can see why some readers gave this book five stars. I also sympathise with those who gave one. On a purely personal level I’m somewhere in the middle. I think James Joyce would think this a perfectly acceptable place to be

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng – Shut That Door!

The House of Doors is a novel by Tan Twan Eng, published in 2023 and long-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.

Lesley Hamlyn, a widow living alone in South Africa, takes delivery of an old book of Somerset Maugham short stories, called The Casuarina Tree. This sends Lesley back in her memories to 1921, when Maugham, a friend of her husband, stayed with the Hamlyns in Penang, Malaya. Travel for Maugham served as an escape from an unhappy marriage, a chance to conduct an affair with his secretary Gerald Haxton in relative safety, and an opportunity to gather material for his work. Lesley told the visiting writer lots of stories, from her own, and other people’s lives, some of which appeared in The Casuarina Tree.

A novel about a famous writer does naturally invite comparisons. Before reading The House of Doors, I read The Casuarina Tree. One of the most striking differences between the two was the ‘voice’ of the books. In The House of Doors, a character says something along the lines of ‘I remember as if it were yesterday’. And then we’re supposed to believe that the ensuing prose, with dialogue and fancy descriptive passages, is their spoken account. When people in The Casuarina Tree tell stories, they do so in their own voice, rather than that of a novelist. In comparison with Maugham’s straight forward style, The House of Doors felt a little forced.

Nevertheless I should end on a positive note because there was much in The House for Doors that I did enjoy. There was the setting of Penang, a fascinating, tolerant, easy-going city, where all kinds of people from Asia and Europe rub along together. Ironically, Penang, for a while at least, also provides safe harbour to Chinese revolutionaries who are uncomfortable with different people rubbing along together. They disapprove of the ‘Straits Chinese’ – Chinese migrants who have intermarried with people in the Malay Peninsula. Tolerant places can find themselves in the hazardous position of tolerating people who are temperamentally intolerant. One of the many stories Lesley tells Maugham involves a man who collects decorated local doors, which hang, disembodied from walls, in his personal door museum. If Penang has a door between itself and the outside world, then it’s this kind of suspended door, lovely to look at, but maybe not offering the sort of five lever mortice deadlock that an insurance company might require. Interestingly the owner of the door museum, a Maugham fan, decorates the actual front door of his eccentric door repository with Maugham’s personal symbol, placed at the beginning of his books. This is a hamsa, found on travels in Morocco by his father, a Moorish symbol to bring good luck and ward off the evil eye. The hamsa seeks security, and seeing it on the museum door had me thinking about the contradictions of security. A sanctuary is not necessarily found by slamming the door and bolting it shut. And yet, there are also risks in leaving the door open, giving entry to intolerant people who might endanger a tolerant place.

In the end, however, I think The House of Doors comes down on the side of doors which are appreciated for their beauty rather than for their reinforced hinges, spy holes and strike plates. I think if Maugham had been able to read The House of Doors, he would have enjoyed the fact that now his secrets could finally be fictionalised by another author, without risk of career-ending scandal and imprisonment.

Money by Martin Amis – A High Rate of Interest

Money, by Martin Amis, published in 1984, tells the story of John Self, a London advertising man, brought up partly in America, partly in a London pub called the Shakespeare. He’s a monstrous consumer of junk food, cigarettes, alcohol and pornography. His ad campaigns sell the virtues of products like the Rumpburger. John Self is a tough, nasty bloke who throws his weight and his money around. John, however, has one weakness. There is something in him that wants a finer, better life. This leaves him vulnerable to those who would exploit people who think there is a finer, better life to be had.

John has a fancy that his experience of growing up in the Shakespeare would make a good film. A New York film producer apparently believes in this dream. John Self is now as vulnerable as a young writer seeing an ad for a vanity publisher promising bestsellerdom for a fee.

John’s tough, and diffident search for a better life is extremely funny. I tried to suppress the laughter because, firstly, I was laughing so often, I thought this might be unsettling for anyone close by. Secondly, a lot of the stuff making me laugh wasn’t actually a laughing matter. So I spent most of my time reading Money in a state of painful suppression, which risked triggering an asthma attack, or maybe causing damage to sinuses, or the inner ear.

When I wasn’t trying to stifle laughter, I was also enjoying the book on a thoughtful level, For all its downmarket strut and swagger, Money is an interesting reflection on the nature of culture. There’s energy in the low brow culture that John goes in for. This is lacking in the high arts to which his posh New York girlfriend, Martina, tries to introduce him. But even as John makes his effort at self improvement, we begin to feel that maybe the gulf he is trying to cross isn’t so wide. John grew up in the Shakespeare. If any cultural icon serves to remind us that what we consider high brow often starts out at the other end of the scale, it is Shakespeare.

Martina has a German shepherd dog called Shadow, who she rescued from the streets. Shadow loves his cosy apartment, soft dog bed and kindly lady owner. But taking him for a walk is a risk, because this conflicted animal still wants to run back to the New York streets he was rescued from. John during his time with Martina is in exactly the same position as Shadow. Even though he enjoys his comfortable life with Martina, visiting art galleries and opera houses, a crazy hankering for his old life remains. This opposition makes the book. It is a cultural artefact that combines low and high, leaving me exhausted, a bit wheezy and morally perturbed in the ambivalent, in-between place where the best art has a chance of being made

The Casuarina Tree by Somerset Maugham – Take the Long Way Home

The Casaurina Tree is a collection of Somerset Maugham short stories, published in 1926. They are all set in the 1920s, amongst the British community of what was then the Federated Malay States.

These stories are from a different time, when, particularly in British terms, the world was bigger. I wasn’t very well when I read them, not getting around much. This made it all the more pleasurable to find myself taking long sea voyages, to places where London newspapers are always six weeks out of date. And yet, ironically, the personalities inhabiting these stories have a characteristically small outlook, which strives to never leave England.

I think my favourite story was The Outstation. This little gem was about Mr Warburton, a peripheral member of an old English family, who in his youth frittered away an inheritance, keeping up appearances in card games, and making loans to hard up noblemen, knowing it was bad form to expect the money back. Accepting his losses like a good sport, and not having ever had a proper job, he decides to disappear into colonial administration. By the 1920s Warburton is sitting in his remote outstation in Malaya, fondly recalling a lost aristocratic England, and having to deal with Mr Cooper, who arrives to assist in the station’s duties. Cooper is a man who lacks refinement, but does his job well, a representative of brash, modern meritocracy.

And then we get the really interesting part. Cooper is harsh with his Malay staff. Warburton advises more respect. Things do not go well when Cooper ignores him. In this section of the story we see that Warburton has come to love Malaya and its people because Malay society is old, with long established family lines and traditions. It is actually similar to old, aristocratic, pre-First World War Britain in that respect. Warburton has gone to Malaya, and in doing so, he unexpectedly comes home. The story was a moving combination of leaving and homecoming, loss and recovery.

All the stories revolve around this sort of contradiction, with perhaps The Outstation, for me anyway, as the definitive expression of the theme. The stories are about a specific community, wider changes in British society and identity in the 1920s, and finally, meditations on the contradictory human desire to seek both change and familiarity.

Tom Lake by Ann Pratchett – Chekhov Still Picking Cherries

Tom Lake is Ann Patchett’s 2023 novel about a Michigan cherry farmer. When the pandemic denies the farm its usual workers, Lara Nelson’s grown up daughters return to help out with cherry harvesting. Lara passes the time talking about her short-lived, youthful acting career, and a love affair with an actor who went on to become famous.

Initially I have to admit to finding the novel bemusing. Lara’s account of her past, in polished prose with formal layout of dialogue, did not suggest somebody telling a story to people listening. It was a jolt to emerge from what felt like a novel, to find myself on a cherry farm, required to believe that the preceding section had been a story told while fruit picking. Did Lara have different voices for different characters, like Bernard Cribbins on Jackanory; or, in a more up to date analogy, Stephen Fry doing his thing for Audible? Even though it took a while, I did come to an accommodation with this not very believable narrative style. If the book felt artificial at times, it was very good at showing how reality and artifice tend to hang together. For example, we see good acting achieved by people not trying too hard to act, or people in real life putting on the brave face necessary for skirting over unpleasant realities.

The idea of something real and substantial co-existing with shaky illusion, leads me to what I found the most interesting aspect of Tom Lake – the idea of security. Acting and farming seem very different, one a lot of airy pretence, the other rooted down in the soil. But they are actually similar in both being highly insecure professions. An actor never knows where the next job is coming from, while a farmer is at the mercy of weather and market forces. In Tom Lake, the worlds of acting and farming are fittingly brought together when the characters make reference to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – a play about a lovely nineteenth century cherry orchard on the verge of being swept away by change. And yet in the twenty first century, here we are, still in a cherry orchard. We get plenty of insight into cherries as large scale agri-business, which doesn’t make the fragile orchard less lovely or enduring.

At one point, Lara’s husband, Joe muses on the worst year he can remember for the local farming community :

‘Ninety-five was the year that wiped people out. All summer long it was perfect – the perfect temperatures, the perfect amount of rain, not a single blight on any tree on any farm. The crop was huge, like nothing anyone had seen in decades, and the price went through the floor.’

The perfect year was a disaster, which means that difficult years have their own compensating security.

So shifting sands can offer solid ground. This novel, like all novels, is a concoction of pretence, but it can still offer something substantial. Despite its obvious artifice, I ended up enjoying and admiring Tom Lake. It was thematically intricate and cerebral, but also easy-going, comforting, optimistic, a reassuring book for uncertain times.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley- Strange Mixed Picture

Brave New World, published in 1932, is Aldous Huxley’s famous vision of a dark, future society, where, ironically, everyone is happy and fulfilled.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I don’t like Aldous Huxley’s writing style. He tends to stuff his paragraphs with redundant or repeated words. Look at how many times ‘the’ is repeated on the first page. And, from many possible examples, look at this passage, describing Brave New World residents visiting a ‘savage reservation’.

…their faces inhuman with daubing of scarlet, black and ochre, two Indians came running along the path. Their black hair was braided with fox fur and red flannel. Cloaks of turkey feathers fluttered from their shoulders; huge feather diadems exploded gaudily round their heads. With every step they took came the clink and rattle of their silver bracelets, their heavy necklaces of bone and turquoise beads. They came on without a word, running quietly in their deer skin moccasins’

Seven repetitions of ‘their’ in four sentences.

Right, I’ve got that off my chest.

So, after looking at how he says things, let’s turn to what Huxley is saying. Brave New World describes a society where government control has ended family life. Human reproduction is a factory process, engineering individuals with different intelligence levels to happily fit into a hierarchy of employment. Sex is a recreational activity. Society conditions people to enjoy easy-going, promiscuous relationships, whilst rarely feeling loneliness, or unhappiness. A drug called soma, a kind of alcohol, LSD amalgam, shorn of unpleasant side effects, acts to support eternal contentment in the present moment, without past regrets, or future hopes.

Some aspects of this society made sense to me as a possible scenario. Some did not. The bits that did not mainly concerned the idea of creating individuals with different abilities. Huxley seems to see ability as a very fixed quantity, which can be decanted in greater or lesser amounts into people. This didn’t seem true to life, in the present, or future. As just a brief nod to the real complexities involved, you could think of chaotic individuals with epsilon competence, enjoying alpha-plus confidence, who reach the heights of government. Sometimes it’s not how good you are, it’s how good you think you are that counts. Ability is too diffuse a thing to conveniently measure out.

However, other aspects of the Brave New World society did have a ring of truth. Control of relationships in the interests of authority was interesting, because this has happened historically. For example, there’s the idea of romantic love, which historians suggest was largely invented, or at least idealised, in medieval Europe, as a way for the Church to subdue family power. Family dynasties might want to make politic, arranged marriages in their long term interests. Romance, tends to set young love free, to make any choice it pleases. And young love is not well known for making sober assessments in the family interest. More recently in the UK we have seen a similar process in the use of inheritance tax, particularly after World War One. Aside from contributing a relatively small amount of money to the exchequer, inheritance tax acts to prevent families handing money down generations. This marked the real ending of aristocratic power in Britain, and the final consolidation of modern state government. So, it is true that authority has manipulated family relationships for political ends, and may continue to do so.

Also interesting is the Brave New World idea of happiness in not looking forward or back. There are, indeed, many modern health and spiritual movements – based around mindfulness or meditation for example – that emphasise living in the present moment. Alternative health, aside from its useful aspects, became a surprisingly problematic area during the pandemic, a breeding ground for covid conspiracies, which could extend to a denial that the illness existed. Carried to an extreme, you can imagine the rise of cold-hearted contentment in a drug-assisted present moment, past and future ignored, with people conditioned to believe that unhappiness and illness are not real.

Overall, Brave New World is a mixed bag, in some ways perceptive about human nature, in other ways not really seeming to understand people at all. And then there’s that writing style….

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote – Red Sky at Night, Literary Delight

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella by Truman Capote, published in 1958. A New York writer recalls a time living in his first apartment, setting out on his career with nothing more than a few sharpened pencils and a lot of youthful ambition. That humble apartment was special to him as a place where he could sit down and work on becoming the person he wanted to be.

The writer recounts his memories of Holly Golightly, a neighbour in the same apartment building. His efforts to create a new version of himself at his desk, mirror Holly’s much more exuberant adventures in the same direction. Holly’s uncompromising mission to be herself ironically involves pretending to be someone she’s not. Originally a country girl from Texas, Holly creates a party girl, socialite, Golightly persona, which feels more her than the Lulamae she used to be.

So we start to feel that being yourself often involves living as someone else. If you aspire to be, for example, a writer, you have to pretend to be a writer before actually becoming one. And even after making it, the initial faking tends to linger, maybe in an imposter syndrome. The ‘real’ writer often feels insecure, or a bit of a fraud, pursuing a precarious career with no sick pay or pension plans. Holly Golightly is also a fraud. Lulamea plays Holly Golightly with the kind of all-in method acting that any expensive American acting school would be proud of. But alongside this commitment, Miss Golightly remains a pretence, a fun game. Similarly, if you ever become a proper writer, labouring under deadlines and other mundane realities, Truman Capote seems to suggest that something playful and pretend should remain in your writing, helping it stay enjoyable for writer and reader. After all, a novel is a game of make-believe. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a fascinating play, about ambition, disappointment, consummation, freedom and identity.

As for the quality of writing, from age eleven Truman Capote spent hours practising writing like other children practised violin. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is beautifully written. I can’t resist quoting a quick example. Here are a few lines from the end of the book, describing a storm, which might delay Holly’s final flight out of New York:

‘The sky was red Friday night, it thundered, and Saturday, departing day, the city swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, though it seemed improbable that a plane could penetrate it.’

There is so much in those two sentences – direct description of a storm, indirect suggestion of the dangers Holly faces, and maybe even a hidden reassurance. According to the rhyme, a red sky at night usually means the following day will be a nice one.

Reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a delight for shepherds, party girls, writers, pharmacy staff like me who want to be writers – anyone really.

Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling – an Officer, a Gentleman, and a Very Naughty Boy

Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling, is a collection of stories set at a public school, preparing boys for either British military officer training, or imperial public service. Based on Kipling’s school days at Devon’s United Services College, the stories first appeared in magazines between 1897 and 1899, before publication as a book in 1899. A trio of pupils, Stalky, McTurk and Beetle, feature as the central characters.

This book, and Kipling in general, is somewhat controversial today. But it is interesting that Stalky and Co. was equally controversial when it was first published. Robert Buchanan in The Contemporary Review considered the book vulgar, brutal and savage. Henry James thought it deplorable, Somerset Maugham, odious. Harsh criticism also came from such luminaries as A.C. Benson, Edmund Wilson, and George Sampson, author of the Concise History of English Literature. These reactions do not reflect a once respectable, now outmoded book. It has never been universally well-regarded.

I would suggest that Stalky and Co. might offend now, and when it was published, because it is actually about respectability, presenting an unflinching portrayal of the contradictions that lurk beneath its proper facade.

A ‘good’ pupil at the Stalky school would play cricket, follow the rules, respect authority. There is more than a suggestion that this attitude simply puts boys on a production line, carrying them to a likely death on a foreign field. One master objects to an old boy of the school describing to current pupils the violent end of another old boy during battle. That sort of thing is undermining of morality and good order. You can’t have boys realising what they are signing up for. It might stop them working towards the goals their teachers set for them.

And then there’s all the contradictions involved in a school aiming to produce leaders, while thrashing its students into respectful obedience. One story focuses on a group of boys who are always late for breakfast. Their punishment is to do military drill with an old army veteran. Ironically, this is the only example of actual military activity that goes on here. When a visiting general suggests that the school should have a cadet corp, it is these naughty drill boys who are the only pupils ready to form such a group. And the corp leader is the naughtiest boy of all, Stalky himself. It is Stalky who eventually translates his years of sneaky, frequently vile, school pranks into an highly respectable army career, where tactics of deception and deflection win the day with minimum risk to life, especially his own.

And these ironies around respectability extend to the book’s language – my favourite aspect of Stalky and Co. The dialogue is a complete mishmash of highfalutin Latin, French, quotes from classic authors, and low-brow, local Devon dialect. Stalky and his followers mix all of this language indiscriminately together in an exuberant teenage slang. It’s like the approach the headmaster takes in supporting Beetle’s obvious literary talents, giving him the run of his library, recommending nothing and prohibiting nothing. This is a good training in not being too ready to classify writing into easy categories of respectable or unworthy. Yes, Henry James, Somerset Maugham and people who write fancy histories of English Literature are all correct in their judgements of Stalky and Co. And yet… good writing is often not proper at its heart. It does tend to challenge assumptions in an uncomfortable way. That’s what Stalky and Co. does. I admired it.

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler – Maybe Brighter Later.

Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, is Arthur Koestler’s famous novel based on the events of Stalin’s 1930s purge of supposed enemies of the Soviet state. Millions of ordinary people suffered in this terrible episode, as did important figures in the Soviet government. For the famous there were show trials prosecuting trumped up charges, seeking someone to blame for the fact that socialist utopia had yet to arrive. Darkness at Noon describes the fate of a fictional government official following his arrest.

Do novels change the world? Not often. But maybe this one did.

Koestler wrote the book in France during difficult circumstances at the outbreak of World War Two. An upbringing in Austria, and a history as a Communist sympathising journalist, caused the French to imprison him in an internment camp for undesirable aliens. Koestler’s girlfriend at the time, the young artist Daphne Hardy, managed to get the Darkness at Noon manuscript, written in German, back to London, where Jonathan Cape published her English translation. After the war, the book became a massive bestseller. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Francois Mauriac claimed that record breaking French sales led to the Communist Party losing the French general election of 1946. In the UK, it appears that the Information Research Department, a branch of the British Foreign Office responsible for covert propaganda, purchased thousands of copies to boost the book’s profile, and distributed foreign language editions through embassies.

This is quite a revelation for me. I had always assumed that good novels tend to be unsuitable for propaganda purposes, characteristically dealing with shades of grey rather than the black and white of political slogans. And yet here we have a classic novel which the British government used in covert propaganda campaigns. So, what is this book like?

Nikolai Rubashov, one of the original architects of his country’s communist revolution decades previously, reflects on his life, following arrest. Rubashov’s thoughts deal with all kinds of political and moral complications, but his basic insight is clear – he considers too much clarity of purpose in politics as potentially dangerous. Problems arise when people seek, or are promised, a final outcome so wonderful that any means become acceptable in achieving it. Now, this isn’t a spoiler, but if someone is arrested by secret police, charged with plotting the overthrow of a ruthless political regime, and interrogated by fanatics looking to find a scapegoat for social problems, then it’s pretty clear how things are going to end. But by the time you finish Darkness at Noon you’re thinking that happy endings are positively unhealthy anyway, since they encourage ruthless means to reach them. Reassurance comes from the fact that Rubashov finally sees the advantages of not living life in terms of fairytale happy ever-afters.

Darkness at Noon is an enthralling and powerful novel. The fact that it has nothing of the simple-minded political slogan about it, makes its case all the more persuasive – the case for viewing politics as the Greek philosopher Plutarch once described it:

They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honour, with a feeling for his fellows; and it lasts as long as need be.