Joseph Conrad's indictment of the tsarist autocracy—"the ruthless destruction of innumerable minds… of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature"—sums up the ravages of modern fascism… Those ravages—that destruction of minds and human ties and the accompanying climate of "darkness at noon"—are dramatized in Man Is Strong. The book was published in Italy in 1939, after Alvaro had added a foreword stating that the police state described was Russia.

Scourges as immense as fascism and war present the novelist with a knotty problem of ways and means. A Frenchman has aptly remarked that "a single man killed is a misfortune, a million is a statistic." How to encompass the emotional reality of that aggregate of horrors which so easily becomes "a statistic" or a remote abstraction—"war dead," "purge," "pogrom"? [Albert] Camus's answer in The Plague was vividly realistic allegory. Alvaro's is the symbolism and superrealism of [Franz] Kafka, with its dreamlike intensity. Many of his devices have their exact parallel in The Trial—the mysterious circumstance left unexplained, the sinister coincidence, the felt presence of unseen, omnipotent powers, and so on.

The story opens with the return of Dirck, an expatriate, to his native country, recently emerged from civil war. Instantly, the atmosphere is that of waking nightmare. People stare "with hate" at Dirck's good clothes. Strange officials know his name and face. His room is searched. Barbara, with whom he renews an old love affair (years earlier she had been abroad), is terrified that to be seen with him will "incriminate" her. Danger and senseless prohibition hang over everything, and Dirck is rapidly infected with the cringing anxiety which is the norm—the obsessive consciousness that "they" are watching, listening, condemning. He feels guilty of a nameless crime, which he has not committed—and is certain to commit. "My dear," says his superior, "often the mere appearance of guilt is a crime."

Dirck's initiation into this "mysticism of crime" comes from a chance meeting with "the investigator," who takes him to an office decorated with pictures of hanged men. "We must destroy everything private, personal, intimate; there lies the cause of all evils," says the investigator. "To have a secret is a crime." Execution of the guilty makes crime "as beneficial an example to society as that set by the most loyal citizen." The prospective criminal "interests us enormously … We need him." Corrupters, too, are needed to keep society well supplied with the spectacle of educative punishment, and the man from abroad is ideal for this form of "public service." Everything about him incites the guilty. "To borrow a term from religion, he is the devil." Dirck now sees clearly that his love for Barbara is a criminal conspiracy against the state. And when eventually, crazed by fear, he commits' a real crime, he feels that some monstrous plan which "they" conceived has been accomplished.

Since I've seen the book criticized for the very thing it aims at, its surrealistic quality, I should perhaps say that if you insist on lifelike characterization and the other qualities of conventional realism, then Alvaro is decidedly not your man. What he is so successful in achieving is the anguished climate of nightmare and baleful unreason. His book has, too, something of that tension of ideas which distinguished Darkness at Noon. It is a thoroughly unusual novel, and, to my mind, a remarkable one.