Arthur Koestler was one of those rare figures in modern political literature—the principled materialist-whose grim outlook only gave him a more profound sympathy for mankind. From the early Fifties onward, he wrote vast and lucid works on scientific questions, resolving to leave spiritual matters to the clerics, and yet inevitably he is remembered as the author of Darkness at Noon, the study of a soul defenseless against an evil of its own devising. His sorrowful, world-weary philosophy might easily have become a posture, like Hemingway’s stoical sensualism, but he was far too honest for that. Koestler had as great a command of sensual images and of the workings of the inner life, yet in his work there is not the same undercurrent of self-pitying despair one often finds in Hemingway. His characters are not merely absorbed in resolving personal traumas, but are concerned with moral issues beyond themselves.
Like most of his fiction, Arrival and Departure (now re-issued in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series, 190 pp., $7.95) is about one man up against a malevolent totalitarian regime. But unlike the old revolutionary in Darkness at Noon, Rubashov, Peter Slavik is not an accomplice to the regime who must now submit to the fatal logic of his own doctrines. He is an innocent victim who, having escaped to “Neutralia” in wartime, must decide what his duties are to those left behind. Having witnessed the beatings and deportations and mass executions, can one in good conscience flee to safety?
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