Word: rubashov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
What is horrifying about the Koestler novel is that the reader becomes convinced that in Rubashov's place he himself would become a complying victim. Anyone in the 20th century can become a victim; that needs no further proof. But a further evil is possible, Irish Writer Victor Price argues in this thoughtful first novel. What Price suggests is that anyone, bound up in the tangled complicities of corrupting power, may become an interrogator. Price's hero is Hugh Barbour, a classicist who escapes from his academic hide-hole into a job interrogating Greek prisoners for the British...