Darkness at Noon was an essential text of my adolescence. One of those books that everyone had to read. A time before the fall of the iron curtain, when the cold war still wrapped the planet in an icy embrace. At the same time, we in Britain weren’t sacred of being imprisoned for out political views, unlike someone my age growing up in the country I now live in, and many others. We thought, reading the book, that we were being given an insight, allowed to eavesdrop, on a world that was ‘over there’, the land of the bogeymen. We weren’t aware of what our government had been doing in the likes of Kenya, Borneo, India, even Northern Ireland, at the same time as Stalin & co were waging their ideological wars against their own citizens, a war that Koestler examines with forensic skill. Then for a long time, I guess after the fall of the wall, all that jazz, the novel seemed out-dated, belonging to another era. In truth, its meticulous intellectual tone does sound like it emerges from another mindset, on that predates Tarantino, Baudrillard, and all the other high priests of historical relativity. However, the content seems, if anything, even more pertinent now than it did back in those adolescent Winchester days. Koestler examines a state where the personal and the political cannot be divorced. For decades we inhabited the false idea that these Siamese twins been successfully and surgically pulled apart. But it was never that simple. Sooner or later they were likely to collide once more. From China to the USA to Europe (including the UK), from Guantanamo detainees to Uyghur camps to Catalan rappers, the liberty of political expression, and the punishment for deviating from the received status quo, is ever more in the balance. Darkness at Noon reads like a voice from the near-past bearing warnings about our near-future.
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