Since it is in the grip of a fixed idea, Darkness at Noon has little of the intellectual fluidity, the richness of absorbed life, the complex interplay between emotion and ideology, that distinguishes the political novel at its best. Though the subject of Koestler's book can be seen as the increasingly problematic nature of all modern politics, it seldom yields itself to the problematic as a mode of feeling or observation. Can one say that a certain kind of commitment to the problematic may itself become a form of ideological fanaticism? If so, that is how to describe Darkness at Noon. For Koestler is the sort of writer who manipulates his characters with a ruthless insistence that they conform to his will, that they illustrate prefabricated themes rather than fulfill their inner possibilities. Only intermittently does he do the novelist's job and, as one might expect, it is then that he is at his best, relaxing his ideological hold—that grim insistence upon the dazzling formula which is all too often a sign of intellectual panic—and letting his imagination work freely. (p. 227)

In the first regard, [Darkness at Noon] is often superb. Confined to one locale, one line of action, one dominating character [Rubashov], it accumulates great dramatic intensity, and … [at times] it reaches a concentrated expression of all the horror of modern politics. (pp. 227-28)

But the novel is crucially flawed, and Rubashov thinned into abstractness, by Koestler's simple and often crude theorizing…. (p. 228)

What appears to be the iron logic in Rubashov's reflections is achieved by a ruthless elimination of complicating alternatives at each point of his argument; Koestler is imitating not any possible version of the Rubashov type but his own self-confirming hypothesis of the "inner necessity" of Rubashov's capitulation. Indeed, it is precisely the apparent rigor of Rubashov's argument which renders Koestler's portrait of him suspect, for it assumes that Rubashov's gradual surrender to Stalinism is a dialectical process within his own thought, a valid deduction from the premises of his political career. But this is manifestly untrue to our sense of human behavior, even the behavior of Bolshevik politicians. Between the assumptions of theory and the conclusions of defeat there must lie a whole middle ground of Rubashov's experience, the gradual destruction of his will and integrity as he takes step after step toward acquiescing to the regime he knows to be vile. By the time of the action described in Darkness at Noon, Rubashov has already been destroyed or has already destroyed himself, and the post hoc rationalizations in which he might be supposed to indulge, and which for Koestler are the heart of his dilemma, would bear little relation to the actual process of his disintegration. (p. 229)

What finally gives Darkness at Noon so "unreal" a quality, and this despite its interludes of brilliant realism, is that Koestler approaches the problem of historical action with a wilful insistence upon an either/or dilemma—either amoral activism or moral passivity. This rigid fascination with absolutes and an equally rigid elimination of any possible choices of action lying between these absolutes, lends his novels the appearance of intellectual clarity, of getting down to "fundamentals"; but the fundamentals prove to be little more than a dazzling phrase and the clarity that of an over-focussed and thereby untrustworthy picture…. [He ignores] the vast preponderance of choices made by men in history, choices that involve a tension between the demands of historical pressure and the demands of moral standards, not to mention a reliance upon the tact of instinctual response. Koestler's method of analysis—which, in his case, is the same as saying, his method of writing a novel—may give a momentary illusion of logical rigour; but it cannot yield a credible portrait of a man thinking or, more important, of a man suffering from the need to rethink ideas that he once had accepted on faith. Rubashov may seem to reason, but he does not breathe…. [Koestler is more] concerned with the phrase than the experience it is supposed to illuminate…. (pp. 230-31)

A major part of his intention in writing Darkness at Noon must surely be to warn against the abstractions of ideology, those abstractions which, if allowed to spawn too freely, tend to dehumanize our lives—yet every line Koestler writes, and one doubts that he can avoid it, is suffused with ideology. (p. 231)