BOOKS
101
be
a law against such place-names), with which the ' book begins, Peter
has already given up his connection with The Party, after many months
in
a Nazi concentration camp. Why? Because the very intensity of the
sufferings he had borne without cracking had helped to convince this
22-year old son of the middle class that his resistance was due to some
other source than loyalty to the Party. The rank-and-file Party members
had succumbed to the tortures of the Gestapo and had betrayed their
oath, and they admired this faitful Peter as a hero. But isn't there some–
thing suspicious, Peter asked himself, in being a hero?
Yet when he jumps ship at Neutralia, Peter is still a carrier of ban–
ners, determined to get back into the battle through offering himself as
a volunteer to the British. While waiting, however, for the slow. pro–
cesses of the Consulate to lift him out of neutrality, he falls in love with
a French refugee, Odette, a girl whose moral philosophy is neatly sum–
med up by Koestler in the phrase, "After all-why not?"
The love affair, which Koestler handles rather spottily, ends abrupt–
ly when Odette leaves without warning for America. The sudden aban–
donment proves too much for Peter; he is smitten with a psychic paralysis
of the right leg, on which the Nazi torturers have left fatal stigmata of
cigar burns. The most exciting sequence in the novel is the unexpected
physical collapse of Peter as the scar of the burn in the bend of his
knee becomes a hole through which "the strength had run out of his leg
like water out of the bath of Sonia," the female psychoanalyst in whose
apartment he is staying.
The core of the book is the psychic analysis itself, during which the
half-allegorical figure of Dr. Sonia Bolgar rocks in her chair by the bed–
side of the fallen warrior, drawing from him the tale of his deeds and
his dreams. The surface layers of Peter's mental tissue contain the hor–
rors of his actual experiences in Nazi Europe-his capture, the black-clad
torturers, the "mixed transports" in which captured girls, gypsies and
Jews are dragged across the continent to nightmarish fates. But when
these memory fabrics are torn up by the analysis, they bring with them,
like an uprooted sod, growths belonging to still deeper fears and defeats:
childhood crimes, expiations and vows to which all his adult life has
chained itself through symbolic transferences and confusions of identity.
When the bottom is reached, and the original sin disinterred-the "acci–
dental" putting out of his brother's eye at the age of five, which he
knew subconsciously was not an accident at all-Peter is cured, "cured
of his illusions, both about objective aims and subjective motives."
The new Peter decides to cast aside all political totems-"What real
good had come of those quixotic
crus~des
?" But a certain
uneasi~ess
springs up in connection with this plan too. However disillusioned he
may have become, Peter is dedicated to political action, "he is not the
type to back out and cultivate a garden." Below the values uprooted
by psychoanalysis, judgments continue to form themselves, perhaps
simply out of the need to act, characteristic of Peter and his generation.
