Mountain Devil

Recommend: No

There is a base social horror underlying certain portrayals of communist states that I find truly unsettling. It’s not the fear that you will be part of a persecuted group (like Nazism against Judaism) or subjected to the whims of a vicous conqueror (like Japan against China in WWII), but instead that a perpetual and pervasive terror is the whole basis for society. Stalin’s purges, the East German Stasi and Mao’s Cultural Revolution are all examples of destroying the old, for no reason other than it is a necessary step to build something truly new.

Darkness by Noon follows Rubashov, an ex-hero of an unnamed (but obviously USSR) socialist state who is arrested one Winters night and tried as part of the state’s relentless purges. The story occurs over three chapters, with a private hearing in the prison at the end of each.

Rubashov is not a man trying to escape the regime, he made it. He still believes in it. He can see the hypocrisies and inefficiencies in its modern incarnation, but truly believes in the mission of the global revolution. This is what makes the book interesting. His hearings occur with first the old guard (who attempts to persuade him with logic), before they are themselves “administratively liquidated” and the new guard replaces them (who rely on breaking him – not with violence, but by exhaustion). “Rubashov had heard of this method of complete physical crushing of the accused… but the difference with Gletkin’s (the interrogator) method was that he was himself never relieved, and exacted as much from himself as from Rubashov”.

The story is interspersed with flashbacks to earlier times and reflections from Rubashov. He knows he has done wrong. His most prominent regret is the failure to act to protect his once secretary from becoming victim to the Party as he now becomes himself. However, it is clear there is no right. Revisionism means that at some point all your actions will become provocateur plots. When discussing another of the old guard, an admiral “He declaimed up to the very end of big tonnage and world revolution. He was two decades behind the times.”. The only truth is the Party, however there are subtleties beyond this I can see, but struggle to put into words. This monologue and dialogue heavy combo forms the basis of much of the book. This feels like a very Russian approach to literature. It must be all those cold winters that get their authors worked up about such things.

Darkness by Noon does not dwell on the miseries of life in the Soviet prison as its main point unlike A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich does. However, the setting of the prison remains an engaging background if only for its Kafkaesque mystery. The prisoners can only communicate with taps on their piping and his only real neighbour is an old royalist. An unusual event in itself as Rubashov notes “we thought that nowadays they only existed in the speeches of No, 1 as scapegoats for his failures”.

There were bits that dragged on a bit, but never for more than a page or two and I will admit I am prone to skipping a journal entry or song in a book. I toyed with whether this was a recommend: yes, but ultimately decided that it didn’t quite live up to those levels of enjoyment or ideas. Despite that, it was an enjoyable interesting read at a short 200 pages and not overly difficult, but don’t go in looking for a happy ending.