Word: gletkin
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...that Vandenberg's therapist-interrogator says is plainly reasonable; the Soviets, by his plausible account, really are providing the greatest good for the greatest number. Very briefly, the reader is reminded of the coldly logical dialogues in Darkness at Noon between the old Bolshevik Rubashov and his inquisitor, Gletkin. But little in Vandenberg's sulky response is heroic, or even intelligent. In effect, he simply shrugs. He is not interested in the greatest number. All he wants is for society to leave him alone...
Nerve and high intelligence are needed to write at Koestler's level, and Author Lange does not seem to have either. The power of Darkness at Noon lay in the fact that the inquisitor Gletkin, proceeding logically and fairly from Rubashov's own assumptions, forced him to assent to the value of his own execution. Lange, on the other hand, flies into fantasy. There is a power failure at the brain laundry, and Vandenberg climbs the electric fence and escapes...
...internal-combustion engine, not by invention but by refinement. The modern subtlety is the obscene symbiosis in which interrogator and victim cooperate willingly in an elaborate pretense of the victim's guilt. And the basic document of this condition is the long dialogue between Rubashov and Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon...
...than the real one. Germany is called Armagnac; Paris, Sybaris; everyone is spied on by an agency of the Western alliance called the Office of Strategic Information. Science is a weapon for soldiers, not a tool of philosophers. A power-warped rationalist named Elliot, who strongly resembles the villainous Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, speculates with pleasure on "the electronics of the soul"-soon, he promises, cyberneticists will know enough about mechanical brains to control human nerve cells with ease. "We are moving," someone says, "toward a new Middle Age," in which politician-scientists will...
Travis Linn and David Pursley, as Ivanov and Gletkin respectively, seem physically very young for their imposing roles as interrogators of Rubashov. Pursley's Indoor Athletic Building haircut perhaps gives the impression in his case. But both act with ease and are reasonable representations of Party hacks...